Bilateral trade deficits are a perennial policy issue. Former Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Japan and China, Merit Janow (1994 p. 55), notes that during the first George Bush administration, “High deficits coupled with the continuing allegations from U.S. business interests about the closed nature of the Japanese market were resulting in serious domestic political pressures for improved access to the Japanese market.” Recently Robert C. Feenstra et al. (1998 p. 1) made similar comments vis-a-vis China: “Some analysts have interpreted the large U.S.–China bilateral trade deficit as prima facie evidence of unacceptably high levels of protectionism in China, and have advocated stringent entry conditions for China’s admission into WTO.” Given the policy salience of bilateral trade deficits, it is peculiar that no one has ever examined them empirically for a broad set of countries. One reason for the scant study is that economists are naturally (and sensibly) loath to accept the terms of the policy debate, which considers bilateral trade deficits ipso facto harmful. A second reason is that economists believe there may be very natural explanations for bilateral imbalances. One such explanation finds its origins in macroeconomic identities that equate current-account deficits to an excess of investment over saving. From this, it may be argued that bilateral imbalances will arise naturally in trade between countries in aggregate surplus and those in aggregate deficit. Indeed, this is the principal explanation that the profession has given policymakers, and it forms the foundation of many U.S. bilateral trade initiatives such as the Structural Impediments Initiative and the Framework talks. Janow (1994 p. 55) observes that “there was (and is) little disagreement among economists that the causes of large aggregate and bilateral deficits are largely attributable to macroeconomic factors” [italics added]. A second account may rely on what may be termed “triangular trade,” in which cross-country differences in the patterns of demand and supply mean that a country will run bilateral deficits with those countries that are unusually important suppliers of the goods for which the deficit country happens to be an unusually strong demander. In this paper, we use the canonical “gravity model” of bilateral trade to form predictions about bilateral trade balances. We develop two key variants of the model, in which bilateral trade imbalances arise due to aggregate macroeconomic imbalances or due to “triangular trade,” and we implement these empirically for a broad set of countries. Our results paint a dismal picture. The central explanations that economists provide to explain bilateral balances perform miserably. There are two key failures. First, actual bilateral trade imbalances are much larger than those predicted; there is a “mystery of excess trade balances.” Second, even after we allow for both macroeconomic imbalances and idiosyncrasies in the structure and levels of demand and production, the models perform poorly in explaining bilateral trade balances. These failures of economists’ standard explanations of bilateral trade imbalances require that we move beyond the simple gravity framework to consider alternative explanations: homogeneous goods, highly specialized intermediates, and the role of policy.

A half century of empirical work attempting to predict the factor content of trade in goods has failed to bring theory and data into congruence. Our study shows how the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek theory, when modified to permit technical differences, a breakdown in factor price equalization, the existence of nontraded goods, and costs of trade, is consistent with data from ten OECD countries and a rest-of-world aggregate.

The integrated equilibrium is a paradigm that has played a central role in the field of international trade. The concept originated with Paul A. Samuelson (1949), was further developed by Avinash K. Dixit and Victor F. Norman (1980), and placed at the heart of international analysis by Elhanan Helpman and Paul R. Krugman (1985). The central idea is that a world with imperfect mobility of productive factors across regions or countries may replicate the essential equilibrium of a fully integrated economy, provided that goods are perfectly mobile. The concept of the integrated equilibrium has proved to be exceptionally tractable and useful for analytic developments, as for example in the work of Gene M. Grossman and Helpman (1992). We have found using elements of integrated equilibrium analysis useful in our own work (e.g., Davis et al., 1997). The central figures in developing the theory of trade and growth within the integrated equilibrium framework have been quite aware of its limitations. Helpman and Krugman (1985) include a section on the cases in which factor-price equalization (FPE) breaks down. Grossman and Helpman (1992) make the distinction between national and international spillovers a key element of their theory of trade and growth. Moreover, the starting point of Krugman’s work in the past decade on economic geography has been precisely to deny that the world operates as if it were an integrated economy. This notwithstanding, we believe that the grip of integrated equilibrium analysis on the way that the economics profession conceives of world trade patterns remains very powerful and in important ways distorts one’s view of trade relations, particularly among the relatively rich countries of the OECD. We do not propose to banish integrated equilibrium analysis. We believe that it is useful in the proper context. However, we do propose that it is important to have a fuller appreciation of the limits of such analysis from an empirical standpoint and thus to have a richer view of the determinants of world trade patterns.

Recent articles have shown that contracts can support the efficient outcome for bilateral trade, even in the face of specific investments and incomplete contracting. These studies typically considered “selfish” investments that benefit the investor (e.g., the seller's investment reduces her production costs). We find very different results for “cooperative” investments that directly benefit the investor's partner (e.g., the seller's investment improves the buyer's value of the good). Most importantly, if committing not to renegotiate the contract is impossible, then contracting has no value, i.e., the parties cannot do better than to abandon contracting altogether in favor of ex post negotiation.

We employ a natural experiment from the 1980s, predating the ubiquitous clamor for independence influenced corporate governance structures, to examine which governance mechanisms are associated with firm survival and failure. We find that thrifts were more likely to survive the thrift crisis when their CEO also chaired the firm’s board of directors. On average, chair-holding CEOs undertook less aggressive lending policies than their counterparts who did not chair their boards. Consequently, taxpayer interests were protected by thrifts that bestowed both leadership posts to one person. This is an important policy issue, because taxpayers become the residual claimants for depository institutions that fail as a result of managers adopting risky strategies to exploit underpriced deposit insurance. Our findings corroborate recent evidence that manager-dominated firms resist shareholder pressure to adopt riskier investment strategies to exploit underpriced deposit insurance.

We conduct an empirical study of the impact of consumer price search on the shifting of cigarette excise taxes to consumer prices. We use novel data on the prices that smokers report paying and document substantial price dispersion. We find that cigarette taxes are shifted at lower rates to carton buyers and, especially, smokers who buy cartons of cigarettes in a state other than their state of residence. We also find evidence that taxes are shifted at somewhat lower rates to the prices paid by heavier smokers and at somewhat higher rates to the prices paid by smokers of light cigarettes.

Despite their ubiquity, observational studies to infer the causal effect of a so-called immutable characteristic, such as race or sex, have struggled for coherence, given the unavailability of a manipulation analogous to a “treatment” in a randomized experiment and the danger of posttreatment bias. We demonstrate that a shift in focus from actual traits to perceptions of them can address both of these issues while facilitating articulation of other critical concepts, particularly the timing of treatment assignment. We illustrate concepts by discussing the designs of various studies of the role of race in trial court death penalty decisions.

A model of major league baseball is developed which distinguishes between league behavior and individual team behavior. The league is viewed as setting rules that restrict the team's willingness to pay and/or impose costs on the transfer of players between teams. Given these rules, teams then compete for player services. The model is estimated and tested. The evidence suggests that the restrictive effect of league rules on player salaries declined between 1986-1988 and 1989-1991, consistent with anecdotal evidence. Within the rules established by the league, however, teams appear to behave as competitive price-takers through the entire sample period.