Domestic policies that regulate the horizontal dimensions of product differentiation can impede international trade and have become a major concern in contemporary trade negotiations. We estimate trade frictions associated with incompatible designs of electric plugs, a well-known example of a...

We highlight a lesser-known consequence of the remarkable slowdown in global trade growth in recent years: the rise of criminal activities. Applying the textual analysis to millions of judgment documents at all levels of courts in China, we construct measures of crime rates that vary across...

This paper examines jointly optimal monetary and macroprudential policies through the lens of targeting rules that are both implementable and optimal. Based on a DSGE framework that features nominal rigidity, housing, and an incomplete financial market, our targeting rules outperform an optimal...

We study the effect of heterogeneous monopsony power across Chinese firms on the equilibrium allocation of labor. Based on the fact that heterogeneity in monopsony power results from the heterogeneity in workers’ preferences for the jobs provided by an individual firm, we build a model to...

We provide a direct test of the impact of altruism on remittances. From a sample of 105 male migrant workers from Kerala, India working in Qatar, we elicit the propensity to share with others from their responses in a dictator game, and use it as a proxy for altruism. When the entire sample is...

[...]In this article, we model the relationship between goodsinflation and services inflation from 1967:2 to 2002:4. To helpinform the inflation debate, we then use our results to forecastinflation for 2003. The specific inflation series that we model isthe quarterly change (at an annual rate)...