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Go West Young Man: Self-Selection And Endogenous Property Rights, Taylor Jaworski, Bart J. Wilson
Go West Young Man: Self-Selection And Endogenous Property Rights, Taylor Jaworski, Bart J. Wilson
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
If, as Hume argues, property is a self-referring custom of a group of people, then property rights depend on how that group forms and orders itself. In this article we investigate how people construct a convention for property in an experiment in which groups of self-selected individuals can migrate between three geographically separate regions. To test a hypothesis of Demsetz's, we vary across two treatments the external benefits of migrating. We find that self-selection has a powerful effect on establishing conventions of property and begetting increases in wealth through exchange and specialization. We also find support for the Demsetz hypothesis.
Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods And The Welfare Gains From Trade After 1492, Jonathan Hersh, Hans-Joachim Voth
Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods And The Welfare Gains From Trade After 1492, Jonathan Hersh, Hans-Joachim Voth
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
When did overseas trade start to matter for living standards? Traditional real-wage indices suggest that living standards in Europe stagnated before 1800. In this paper, we argue that welfare rose substantially, but surreptitiously, because of an influx of new goods as a result of overseas trade. Colonial luxuries such as tea, coffee, and sugar transformed European diets after the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These goods became household items in many countries by the end of the 18th century. We use three different methods to calculate welfare gains based on price data and …
Gatt, Dispute Settlement And Cooperation: A Reply, Dan Kovenock, Marie Thursby
Gatt, Dispute Settlement And Cooperation: A Reply, Dan Kovenock, Marie Thursby
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
In our 1992 paper, we analyzed GATT and its dispute settlement procedure (DSP) in the context of a supergame model of international trade featuring both explicit (GATT) and implicit (non-GATT) agreements. Our paper departed from the previous economics literature on GATT enforcement (see, for instance Hungerford (1991) and Ludema (1990)) by incorporating the ``twin engines of international obligation and retaliation'' (Hudec, 1990). International obligation imposed a cost of violating an explicit international agreement, such as GATT, while retaliation could take place either within the rules stipulated by the international agreement or by punishment outside of the agreement. In Section 2 …