Risk, Government and Globalization: International Survey Evidence

This paper uses international survey data to document two stylized facts. First, risk aversion is associated with anti-trade attitudes. Second, this effect is smaller in countries with greater levels of government expenditure. The paper thus provides evidence for the microeconomic underpinnings of the argument associated with Ruggie (1982), Rodrik (1998) and others that government spending can bolster support for globalization by reducing the risk associated with it in the minds of voters.Trade attitudes, risk

Globalization, Growth and Distribution in Spain 1500-1913

The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently, economic historians have presented evidence from England showing that the dramatic reversal in distributional trends – from a steep secular fall in wage-land rent ratios before 1800 to a steep secular rise thereafter – must be explained both by industrial revolutionary growth forces and by global forces that opened up the English economy to international trade. This paper explores whether and how the relationship was different for Spain, a country which had relatively poor productivity growth in agriculture and low living standards prior to 1800, was a late-comer to industrialization afterwards, and adopted very restrictive policies towards imports for much of the 19th century. The failure of Spanish wage-rental ratios to undergo a sustained rise after 1840 can be attributed to the delayed fall in relative agricultural prices (due to those protective policies) and to the decline in Spanish manufacturing productivity after 1898.Growth, distribution, globalization, Spain

Trade, Technology and the Great Divergence

This paper develops a model that captures the key features of the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence between the industrializing \North" and the lagging \South." In particular, a convincing story is needed for why North-South divergence occurred so dramatically during the late 19th Century, a good hundred years after the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. To this end we construct a trade/growth model that includes both endogenous biased technologies and intercontinental trade. The Industrial Revolution began as a sequence of unskilled-labor intensive innovations which initially incited fertil- ity increases and limited human capital formation in both the North and the South. The subsequent co-evolution of trade and technological growth however fostered an inevitable di- vergence in living standards - the South increasingly specialized in production that worsened their terms of trade and spurred even greater fertility increases and educational declines. Biased technological changes in both regions only reinforced this pattern. The model high- lights how pronounced divergence ultimately arose from interactions between specialization from trade and technological forces.

Trade and Empire, 1700-1870

This paper surveys the rise and fall of the European mercantilist system, and the transition to the modern, well-integrated international economy of the 19th century. It also surveys the literature on the links between trade and economic growth during the period, and on the economic effects of empire.trade, empire, history

The Determinants of Individual Attitudes Towards Immigration

We are grateful to Kevin Denny and Chris Minns for helpful suggestions. O’Rourke is a

A Characterization of Visibility Graphs for Pseudo-Polygons

In this paper, we give a characterization of the visibility graphs of pseudo-polygons. We first identify some key combinatorial properties of pseudo-polygons, and we then give a set of five necessary conditions based off our identified properties. We then prove that these necessary conditions are also sufficient via a reduction to a characterization of vertex-edge visibility graphs given by O'Rourke and Streinu

Ear-clipping Based Algorithms of Generating High-quality Polygon Triangulation

A basic and an improved ear clipping based algorithm for triangulating simple polygons and polygons with holes are presented. In the basic version, the ear with smallest interior angle is always selected to be cut in order to create fewer sliver triangles. To reduce sliver triangles in further, a bound of angle is set to determine whether a newly formed triangle has sharp angles, and edge swapping is accepted when the triangle is sharp. To apply the two algorithms on polygons with holes, "Bridge" edges are created to transform a polygon with holes to a degenerate polygon which can be triangulated by the two algorithms. Applications show that the basic algorithm can avoid creating sliver triangles and obtain better triangulations than the traditional ear clipping algorithm, and the improved algorithm can in further reduce sliver triangles effectively. Both of the algorithms run in O(n2) time and O(n) space.Comment: Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Information Technology and Software Engineering Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering Volume 212, 2013, pp 979-98