We propose a theory of trade in which comparative advantages reveal themselves gradually over the path of development. Following the Ricardian tradition, countries specialise and export the set of goods they are able to produce at relatively lower cost given their exogenous initial endowments....

We provide evidence showing that the degree of diversification of import sources of finely disaggregated commodities rises monotonically along the growth path. This result is robust to different measures of import diversification and the inclusion of a large set of additional control variables....

This paper analyzes preferences in the presence of ambiguity that are rational in the sense of satisfying the classical ordering condition as well as monotonicity. Under technical conditions that are natural in an Anscombe-Aumann environment, we show that even for such general preference model...

This paper considers local and global multiple-prior representations of ambiguity for preferences that are (i) monotonic, (ii) Bernoullian, i.e. admit an affine utility representation when restricted to constant acts, and (iii) locally Lipschitz continuous. We do not require either Certainty...

This paper studies the costs and benefits of delegating decisions to superiorly informed agents relative to the use of rigid, non discretionary contracts. Delegation grants some flexibility in the choice of the action by the agent, but also requires the use of an appropriate incentive contract...

This paper provides a multiple-priors representation of ambiguous beliefs à la Ghirardato, Maccheroni, and Marinacci (2004) and Nehring (2002) for any preference that is (i) monotonic, (ii) Bernoullian, i.e. admits an affine utility representation when restricted to constant acts, and (iii)...

This paper studies the link between migration, remittances and productive assets accumulation for a panel of poor rural households in Mexico over the period 1997-2006. In a context of financial markets imperfections, migration may act as a substitute for imperfect credit and insurance provision...

We propose an occupational choice model in which the quality of the state bureaucracy influences aggregate output and the level of entrepreneurial activity through its participation in the labour market. Skilled agents differ in terms of their public service motivation: if agents with low public...

We study the updating of beliefs under ambiguity for invariant biseparable preferences. In particular, we show that a natural form of dynamic consistency characterizes the Bayesian updating of these beliefs.

This paper presents a theory in which risk-averse heterogeneously talented entrepreneurs are the key agents driving the process of development and modernisation. Entrepreneurial skills are private information, which prevents full risk sharing. In that setup, development to a modern industrial...