The incomplete nature of contracts governing international transactions limits the extent to which the production process can be fragmented across borders. In a dynamic, general-equilibrium Ricardian model of North-South trade, the incompleteness of international contracts is shown to lead to...

The organization of workers at an establishment into a trade union is a dynamic process. Establishments that have recently been unionized are relatively likely to switch back into nonunion status, compared with long-unionized establishments. This paper develops a model of learning by workers...

Why do firm growth and exit rates decline with size? What determines the size distribution of firms and plants? This paper addresses these questions in a dynamic model of firm size with entry and exit that emphasizes the accumulation of specific factors in response to industry specific...

Standard growth accounting exercises find large cross--country differences in aggregate TFP. Here we ask whether specific sectors are driving these differences, and, if this is the case, which these problem sectors are. We argue that to answer these questions we need to consider four sectors. In...

We study the impact of three different types of policy on the sectoral composition of employment and on the overall level of market employment: (1) regulations that reduce the efficiency of market production, such as administrative burdens on companies, (2) income transfers across population...

We study the interactions between aggregate growth and structural change. Our economy has many sectors characterized by different rates of total factor productivity growth and producing differentiated products. All sectors produce consumption goods but one sector, labelled manufacturing, also...

This paper presents an analytically tractable model in which firm dynamics is driven by technology adoption and fixed costs. Existing firms experience idiosyncratic changes in technology. On average, the rate of technological progress among existing firms is slower than that of the frontier...

Before the abolition of slavery, some states and counties in the U.S.A. relied more on slavery than others, and the most slave intense regions were among the richest in the nation. Today, however, previously slave intense regions are among the poorest. We pose two questions. (1) What can account...

We consider a simple model of market structure determination with discrete product differentiation and strategic interaction between firms. Our equilibrium concept is based on a set of relatively weak conditions that describe the profits of active and potential firms in a market. In our model,...