Governance today is being reconfigured by the evolving global demand for unskilled labor in the North and elite intransigence linked to limited capital inflows in the South. The emerging profile is one of dual economies wherein the wealthy dominate decision-making systems and strategic sectors while struggling to sustain a return on their investments, and the poor either emigrate or administer ...

China is one of the most popular investment destinations in the world. This paper argues that FDI inflows into China are in fact driven by some fundamental inefficiencies in the Chinese economy. Specifically, one of the inefficiencies has to do with a high level of fragmentation of both goods and asset markets. This fragmentation increases demand for FDI both because market fragmentation makes ...

This paper discusses some puzzles in the contemporary macroeconomic scene in India, from the perspective of public finance and economic development. These include a fiscal deficit higher than it was during the 1991 crisis, but without a large current account deficit or rise in inflation or interest rates, a rising inflow of external capital, accompanied by the RBI’s sterilizing these inflows an...

The article considers the impact of foreign direct investment on employment in Viet Nam, a country that received considerable inflows of foreign capital in the 1990s as part of its increased integration with the global economy. Despite the significant share of foreign firms in industrial output and exports, the direct employment generated has been very limited because of the high labour product...

I study expertise acquisition in a model of trading under asymmetric information. I propose and implement a method to measure r, the ratio of the marginal social value to the marginal private value of expertise. This can be decomposed into three sufficient statistics: traders’ average profits, the fraction of bad assets among traded assets and the elasticity of good assets traded with respect t...

In this paper, I focus on a phenomenon that has not received much attention in the literature, namely that the mere expectation of foreign direct investment (FDI) incentivizes long-maturity investment projects by domestic residents, and a Sudden Stop when expectations are frustrated. Long-maturity investment projects enhance productivity but increase the economy’s vulnerability to Sudden Stop. ...

The 1930’s American Dust Bowl was an environmental catastrophe that greatly eroded sections of the Plains. Analyzing new data collected to identify low-, medium-, and high-erosion counties, the Dust Bowl is estimated to have immediately, substantially, and persistently reduced agricultural land values and revenues. During the Depression and through at least the 1950’s, there was limited realloc...

JEL Classifications: JI, R2 College educated couples are increasingly located in large metropolitan areas. These areas were home to 33 percent of all college educated couples in 1940, 40 percent in 1970, and 48 percent in 1990. We investigate whether this trend can be explained by increasing urbanization of the college educated or the growth of dual career households and the resulting severity ...