Enrollment in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans in rural areas grew more than 50% in the first three quarters of 2007 and has more than tripled since the inception of the MA program at the beginning of 2006. However, rural enrollment remains well below urban enrollment as a percentage of the eligible population. This brief updates early findings from analysis of the Medicare+Choice/MA program prese...

This paper investigates the link between domestic income inequality and international trade using a dynamic model of occupational choice. After showing how systematic patterns of comparative advantage arise among countries with no di®erences in their economic fundamentals, I provide two results regarding trade liberalization describing the full transition dynamics. First, international income d...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effect of infrastructure on industry-level productivity and international specialization, as suggested by Clarida and Findlay’s (1992) model. Attempting to control for simultaneity with a three-stage least squares estimation strategy, we find that public infrastructure helps to explain patterns of comparative advantage and international specializ...

This paper empirically investigates the effect of product cycle on comparative advantage for countries with different knowledge capital endowment. Product cycle is the exogenous nature of technology evolution in each industry. Longer product cycle means new discovery takes longer time to arise. Meanwhile the imitation of existing innovation is easier in industries with longer product cycles. St...

This paper deals with the relation between trade and development when poverty affects individual decision making. We develop a twosector model that links production and schooling decisions under poverty with standard neo-classical trade analyses. The decision to either work or acquire skills depends on households having reached subsistence levels of income, implying that the income level of a c...

For a firm without a readily identifiable brand name, quality reputation may solely reflect the country of origin. In this paper we endogenize country-of-origin reputations and show that these selffulfilling reputations determine not only the average quality of a country’s exports but also the type of products in which a country specializes. Hence, the pattern of international trade can be dete...

This paper treats taxation in kind (IKT) as an example of price regulation, emphasizing IKT-avoidance behavior, and its interactions with the other costs of price controls. This emphasis fundamentally changes efficiency conclusions, and adds new ones. IKTs do not in fact randomly sample suppliers, and the burdens of IKTs are not limited to the hidden tax paid by suppliers that actually transact...

We develop an empirical approach for identifying comparative advantages in bank lending. Using matched credit-export data from Peru, we first uncover patterns of bank specialization by export market: every country has a subset of banks with an abnormally large loan portfolio exposure to its exports. Using outliers to measure specialization, we use a revealed preference approach to show that ban...

This article critically examines the theory of comparative advantage, which underlies the wide-spread support of worldwide trade liberalisations. Both the classical and neoclassical formulations of it are shortly discussed and its essential assumptions are scrutinised. These include the international immobility of capital and labour, balanced trade, the existence of an adjustment mechanism whic...