Middlemen Margins and Globalization

Middlemen Margins and Globalization

We develop a two-good model of North-South trade where middlemen mediate trade in the good exported by the South to overcome quality assurance problems. Middleman margins and entry into intermediation are endogenously determined by underlying distribution of entrepreneurial ability. Trade liberalization increases inequality in the Southern export sector, as middleman margins increase more than ...

Middlemen in Search Equilibrium

This paper shows how including divisibility of goods and productive heterogeneity leads to the emergence of middlemen in an equilibrium search environment. In the baseline model, middlemen are welfare reducing and their number increases as market frictions are reduced. When the model is extended to allow for time taken in production and increasing returns-to-scale in the market meeting technolo...

Bargaining with Middlemen

In this paper, we consider a dynamic and decentralized market modeled by a noncooperative networked bargaining game. Our goal is to study how the network structure of the market and the role of middlemen influence the market’s efficiency and fairness. We introduce the concept of limit stationary equilibrium in a general trading network and use it to analyze how endogenous delay emerges in trade...

Lessons from the margins of globalization: appreciating the Cuban health paradox.

It is widely recognized that Cuba, despite poor economic performance, has achieved and sustained health indices comparable to those in developed countries--the Cuban Paradox. There has been, however, remarkably little scholarship evaluating how this has been accomplished, especially during a period of extreme economic hardship. Cuba's exclusion from the mainstream of "globalization," moreover, ...

Inauthentic authenticity: Semiotic design for globalization in the margins of China