Agriculture is the focus of much contention in free trade negotiations. The Japanese government is against liberalizing the rice trade on the grounds that it would threaten “national food security” in the events of such shocks as crop failure, war, and embargo. Trade liberalization is expected to make Japan more dependent upon food imports and to make the Japanese economy more susceptible to th...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of an agricultural economy in which poor farmers borrow from rich farmers. Because output is stochastic (we allow for idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks), there may be default ex post. We compare equilibria with and without political intervention. Intervention takes the form of a moratorium and is decided by voting. When bad economic shock...

Cuciniello and Signoretti (this issue, hereafter CS) provide a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (NKDSGE) model with imperfect competition in the banking industry and collateral-constrained borrowers to address some important questions. How much does banking industry market structure amplify business cycles? How does strategic interaction between big banks and the central ban...

This paper, using a six-region dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of the world economy, assesses the output and current account implications of permanent oil supply shocks hitting the world economy. For modest-sized shocks and conventional production technologies, the effects are modest. But for larger shocks, for elasticities of substitution that decline as oil usage is reduced to a ...

The literature on recursive preference attributes all the time variation in bond risk premia to stochastic volatility. We introduce another source: time-varying prices of risk that co-move with inflation and consumption growth through a preference shock. We find that a time-varying price of risk driven by inflation dominates stochastic volatility in contributing to time variation in term premia...

Weather fluctuations, such as those caused by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), add to the riskiness associated with agricultural production. Improved predictive capacity may help ameliorate negative impacts of climate and weather shocks on agriculture, but it is possible that the benefits of an improved forecast will be distributed unevenly. In particular, poor farmers may not have acce...

Plasmid pTC-F14 contains a plasmid stability system called pas (plasmid addiction system), which consists of two proteins, a PasA antitoxin and a PasB toxin. This system is closely related to the pas of plasmid pTF-FC2 (81 and 72% amino acid identity for PasA and PasB, respectively) except that the pas of pTF-FC2 contains a third protein, PasC. As both pTC-F14 and pTF-FC2 are highly promiscuous...

We develop a model to analyze one mechanism under which stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection may improve the ability of firms in developing countries to break into export markets. A Northern firm with a superior process technology chooses either exports or technology transfer through licensing as its mode of supplying the Southern market, based on local IPR policy. Given this ...

We examine how the adoption of information communication technology affects bilateral trade. The context is a public program in Norway that rolled out broadband access points leading to plausibly exogenous variation availability and by firms. find makes trade patterns more sensitive distance economic size. These results are consistent with model variable elasticity demand. predicts lowers frict...