infonet-economy

How micromotives, the microstructural features of interactions, and macrobehavior are related is a fundamental question in all social sciences. In this article we argue that laboratory experiments are a useful tool to study this question, because the experimenter can measure motivations, manipulate microstructures, and sometimes even exploit variation in the macrosocial environment.…

The paper explores the evolution of export diversification patterns along the economic development path. Using a large database with 156 countries over 19 years at the HS6 level of disaggregation (4,991 product lines), we look for action at the intensive and extensive margins. We find a hump-shaped pattern of export diversification similar to what Imbs and Wacziarg (2003) found for…

Once again the Doha Round negotiators are struggling to reach an agreement, this time by mid-December 2011 on a “plan B” package that would give increased market access to the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) under simplified rules of origin (RoO). We argue that in spite of some simplifying reforms by the EU and the US, administrative costs associated with establishing origin will…

The aim or this paper is to present a practical manual prepared for the World Health Organization (WHO) on how to identify, collect, estimate and compare costs of the available technical options to provide access to safe drinking water in low-income communities.

This paper estimates the effect of trade liberalization on growth, using plant-level data from Switzerland. We employ a natural experiment framework to quantify the effect of a bundle of treaties liberalizing trade between Switzerland and the EU enacted in June 2002 ("Bilateral Agreements I") on the growth of Swiss plants. Using both a semi-parametric difference-in-…

In heterogeneous treatment effect models with endogeneity, the identification of the local average treatment effect (LATE) typically relies on an instrument that satisfies two conditions: (i) joint independence of the potential post-instrument variables and the instrument and (ii) monotonicity of the treatment in the instrument. We show that identification is still feasible when…

This paper provides a new theoretically-derived measure of preference margins at the product level, that takes into account competition across exporters as well as competition with domestic producers on a given market. This indicator is derived for differentiated goods under imperfect competition, in a frame-work extended from Ottaviano, Tabuchi and Thisse (2002). We compute our…