The Ricardian model predicts that countries should produce and export relatively more in industries in which they are relatively more productive. Though one of the most celebrated insights in the theory of international trade, this prediction has received little attention in the empirical literature since the mid-1960s. The main reason behind this lack of popularity is the absence of clear theoretical foundations to guide the empirical analysis. Building on the seminal work of Eaton and Kortum (2002), we offer such foundations and use them to quantify the importance of Ricardian comparative advantage. In the process, we also provide a theoretically-consistent alternative to Balassa’s (1965) well-known index of ‘revealed comparative advantage.’

This paper examines the tying of lending to investment banking business by universal banks. Tying may alleviate credit rationing by assuring the lender of an adequate share of the social surplus that its lending generates; however, tying raises the profitability of loans to troubled entrepreneurs, softening entrepreneurial budget constraints and reducing effort levels. When investment banking is uncompetitive, the former effect dominates, and there is too little tying; when investment banking is competitive, there is too much tying. We relate our results to the authority structure of the universal bank, which we argue is the appropriate focus for regulation.

How does trade liberalization affect wages? This is the first paper to consider in theory and data how the impact of final and intermediate input tariff cuts on workers' wages varies with the global engagement of their firm. Our model predicts that a fall in output tariffs lowers wages at import-competing firms, but boosts wages at exporting firms. Similarly, a fall in input tariffs raises wages at import-using firms relative to those at firms that only source locally. Using highly detailed Indonesian manufacturing census data for the period 1991 to 2000, we find considerable support for the model's predictions.

We develop a dynamic theory of resource wars and study the conditions under which such wars can be prevented. Our focus is on the interaction between the scarcity of resources and the incentives for war in the presence of limited commitment. We show that a key parameter determining the incentives for war is the elasticity of demand. Our first result identifies a novel externality that can precipitate war: price-taking firms fail to internalize the impact of their extraction on military action. In the case of inelastic resource demand, war incentives increase over time and war may become inevitable. Our second result shows that in some situations, regulation of prices and quantities by the resource-rich country can prevent war, and when this is the case, there will also be slower resource extraction than the Hotelling benchmark (with inelastic demand). Our third result is that because of limited commitment and its implications for armament incentives, regulation of prices and quantities might actually precipitate war even in some circumstances where wars would not have arisen under competitive markets.

We investigate inflation predictability in the United States across the monetary regimes of the twentieth century. The forecasts based on money growth and output growth were significantly more accurate than the forecasts based on past inflation only during the regimes associated with neither a clear nominal anchor nor a credible commitment to fight inflation. These include the years from the outbreak of World War II in 1939 to the implementation of the Bretton Woods Agreements in 1951 and from Nixon's closure of the gold window in 1971 to the end of Volcker's disinflation in 1983.

We track the dividend initiation (DI) decisions from a sample of 6,588 firms that went public during the period 1979–2005 and find that 873 of them initiated dividends. Our primary objective is to determine whether information signaling can explain the DI decision. We find that variables suggested by the dividend-signaling models of John and Williams (1985) and Allen, Bernardo, and Welch (2000) are significant determinants of the DI decision and the associated announcement-period stock price effect. We also find support for the residual, agency, tax, clientele, transaction costs, catering, and life-cycle explanations of dividend policy.

Despite decades of research on how, why, and when companies manage earnings, there is a paucity of evidence about the geographic location of earnings management within multinational firms. In this study, we examine where companies manage earnings using a sample of 2,067 U.S. multinational firms from 1994 to 2009. We predict and find that firms with extensive foreign operations in weak rule of law countries have more foreign earnings management than companies with subsidiaries in locations where the rule of law is strong. We also find some evidence that profitable firms with extensive tax haven subsidiaries manage earnings more than other firms and that the earnings management is concentrated in foreign income. Apart from these results, we find that most earnings management takes place in domestic income, not foreign income.

We find new empirical regularities in the business cycle in a cross-country panel of 22 OECD countries for the period 1972 to 2007; entrepreneurship Granger-causes the cycles of the world economy. Furthermore, the entrepreneurial cycle is positively affected by the national unemployment cycle. We discuss possible causes and implications of these findings.

We study strategic information transmission in an organization consisting of an infinite sequence of individual decision-makers. Each decision-maker chooses an action and receives an informative but imperfect signal of the once-and-for-all realization of an unobserved state. The state affects all individuals' preferences over present and future decisions. Decision-makers do not directly observe the realized signals or actions of their predecessors. Instead, they must rely on cheap-talk messages in order to accumulate information about the state. Each decision-maker is therefore both a receiver of information with respect to his decision and a sender with respect to all future decisions. We show that if preferences are not perfectly aligned, “full learning” equilibria—ones in which the individuals' posterior beliefs eventually place full weight on the true state—do not exist. This is so both in the case of private communication, in which each individual only hears the message of his immediate predecessor, and in the case of public communication, in which a decision-maker hears the message of all his predecessors. Surprisingly, in the latter case full learning may be impossible even in the limit as all members of the organization become perfectly patient. We also consider the case where all individuals have access to a mediator who can work across time periods arbitrarily far apart. In this case, full learning equilibria exist.