According to the terms-of-trade theory, negotiations over tariffs alone, coupled with an effective market access preservation rule, can bring governments to the efficiency frontier. In this paper, we show that the nature of international price determination is important for this central result of the terms-of-trade theory. While the received theory assumes that international prices are fully disciplined by aggregate market clearing conditions, we show here that support for “shallow” integration is overturned, and instead a need for “deep” integration is suggested ? wherein direct negotiations occur over both border and behind-the-border policies ? if international prices are determined through bargaining.

The rise of offshoring of intermediate inputs raises important questions for commercial policy. Do the distinguishing features of offshoring introduce novel reasons for trade policy intervention? Does offshoring create new problems of global policy cooperation whose solutions require international agreements with novel features? In this paper we provide answers to these questions, and thereby initiate the study of trade agreements in the presence of offshoring. We argue that the rise of offshoring will make it increasingly difficult for governments to rely on traditional GATT/WTO concepts and rules—such as market access, reciprocity and non-discrimination—to solve their trade-related problems. (JEL F12, F13, L24)

Society has several institutional mechanisms that promote the control of product health and safety risks and compensation of the income losses that these risks generated. For risks traded in the market, economic forces at work foster each of these objectives. Social insurance programs, such as worker's compensation, promote the compensation objective directly and influence safety incentives through the meritrating procedure. Two additional institutional mechanisms, which are the focus of this paper, are tort liability and regulation. Each of these institutions has assumed a more active role in the last two decades and has been the focus of considerable academic and policy debate. What is most noteworthy about these discussions is that both policymakers and economic analysts generally view each institution as the only societal response to the risk. In the field of legal scholarship, this narrow approach has been termed the tortcentric perspective by Richard Stewart (1987a, b). Such a piecemeal approach may be necessary in some cases as an analytic convenience, but it neglects potentially important interactions of the two systems. In this paper I explore the nature of the institutional interactions in Section I and examine the appropriate institutional design in Section II. The general conclusion is that risk regulation should play a dominant role in augmenting market incentives for risk reduction and that the scope of product liability remedies should be scaled back to reflect its subsidiary role.

The financial industry relies on trade secrecy to protect its business processes and methods, which can obscure critical financial risk exposures from regulators and the public. Using results from cryptography, we develop computationally tractable protocols for sharing and aggregating such risk exposures that protect the privacy of all parties involved, without the need for trusted third parties. Financial institutions can share aggregate statistics such as Herfindahl indexes, variances, and correlations without revealing proprietary data. Potential applications include: privacy-preserving real-time indexes of bank capital and leverage ratios; monitoring delegated portfolio investments; financial audits; and public indexes of proprietary trading strategies.

That the employment rate appears to respond to changes in trend growth is an enduring macroeconomic puzzle. This paper shows that, in the presence of a return to experience, a slowdown in productivity growth raises reservation wages, thereby lowering aggregate employment. The paper develops new evidence that shows this mechanism is important for explaining the growth-employment puzzle. The combined effects of changes in aggregate wage growth and returns to experience account for all the increase from 1968 to 2006 in nonemployment among low-skilled men and for approximately half the increase in nonemployment among all men. (JEL E24, J24, J31)

We begin with two uncontroversial hypotheses - firm productivity is expensive to measure and employment entails relationship-specific investments. These assumptions imply that firms would optimally choose fixed-wage contracts, and complement these with bonus pay when measuring employee performance is not too costly. These assumptions imply that under an optimal employment contract hours of work is less responsive, while total compensation is more responsive to shocks under bonus-pay contracts compared to fixed wage contracts. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) where shocks are proxied using the local unemployment rate, we find strong support for these two implications.

Areas differ in their propensity to experience natural disasters. Exposure to disaster risks can be reduced either through migration (i.e., self-protection) or through public infrastructure investment (e.g., building seawalls). Using migration data from the 1920s and 1930s, this paper studies how the population responded to disaster shocks in an era of minimal public investment. We find that, on net, young men move away from areas hit by tornados but are attracted to areas experiencing floods. Early efforts to protect against future flooding, especially during the New Deal era of the late 1930s, may have counteracted an individual migration response.

In a series of studies employing a variety of approaches, we have found that the potential impact of climate change on US agriculture is likely negative. Deschênes and Greenstone (2007) report dramatically different results based on regressions of agricultural profits and yields on weather variables. The divergence is explained by (1) missing and incorrect weather and climate data in their study; (2) their use of older climate change projections rather than the more recent and less optimistic projections from the Fourth Assessment Report; and (3) difficulties in their profit measure due to the confounding effects of storage.