institutional harmonization and economic integration among nations in world history. While economic integration was increasing throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the extent of integration has come sharply into focus only since the collapse of communism in 1989. In 1995 one dominant global economic system

Economic integration and redistribuitive taxation

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instrumental variables for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions “trumps” everything else. Once institutions are controlled for, conventional measures of geography have at best weak direct effects on incomes, although they have a strong indirect effect by influencing the quality of institutions. Similarly, once institutions are controlled for, trade is almost always insignificant, and often enters the income equation with the “wrong” (i.e., negative) sign. We relate our results to recent literature, and where differences exist, trace their origins to choices on samples, specification, and instrumentation.

This essay provides a perspective on the trend towards integrating psychology into economics. Some topics are discussed, and arguments are provided for why movement towards greater psychological realism in economics will improve mainstream economics.

of employment in response to fluctuations in demand. Economic integration is potentially Pareto-improving but, in the absence of a system of compensation, workers are harmed by greater labor mobility while the owners of firms benefit from higher profits.

to driving forces. My characterization of wage stickiness is rather different from earlier ideas of wage rigidity and more closely integrated with the matching process. The model describes an economic equilibrium and overcomes the arbitrary disequilibrium character of earlier sticky-wage models. A line

The paper develops a procedure for finding a discrete-valued Markov chain whose sample paths approximate well those of a vector autoregression. The procedure has applications in those areas of economics, finance, and econometrics where approximate solutions to integral equations are required. 1.

JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This paper elucidates the underlying economics of the resource-based view of competitive advantage and integrates existing perspectives into a parsimonious model of resources and firm performance. The essence of this model is that four conditions underlie

With increasing size and complexity of the implementations of information systems, it is necessary to use some logical construct (or architecture) for defining and controlling the interfaces and the integration of all of the components of the system. This paper defines information systems

research economist at wiiw and lecturer in economics at Johannes Kepler University. Research was financed by the Jubiläumsfonds of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, Project No. 10202.