The Fair Trade coffee initiative attempts to channel charity from consumers to poor producers via increased prices. Though widely heralded, we show that the rules of the Fair Trade system permit complete arbitraging away of rents due to costly excess certification of output. Using data from an association of coffee cooperatives in Central America, we verify that arbitrage on this margin causes ...

This paper critiques the notion that unfettered inequality is an inevitable consequence of contemporary capitalism, and provides an alternative, new framework for analyzing changes in income and wealth distribution. By thinking of these distributions as the result of changing centrifugal and centripetal economic and political forces, we can identify changes in our economic and social structure ...

The resource curse has drawn much attention from economists and policymakers. An effort to resolve this is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global standard improve transparency accountability in resource-abundant countries. This study theoretically empirically assesses impact of EITI on natural rents. We present simple model describe collusion between politicians comp...