Giovanni Maggi

The Value of Trade Agreements in the presence of Political pressures

An argument often heard in favor of trade agreements is that, by committing to free trade, a government can credibly distance itself from domestic lobbies, But several existing models of endogenous protection suggest that governments have no interest in foreclosing interest group pressures since governments derive rents from the political process. We develop a small‐country model in which factors are sector‐specific in the short run but mobile in the long run. We show that in this setting a government may be worse off in the political equilibrium than under commitment to free trade, and hence it may value a trade agreement.

Diversity and Trade

We develop a competitive model of trade between countries with similar aggregate factor endowments. The trade pattern reflects differences in the distribution of talent across the labor forces of the two countries. The country with a relatively homogenous population exports the good produced by a technology with complementarities between tasks. The country with a more diverse work force exports the good for which individual success is more important. Imperfect observabilitiy of talent strengthens the forces of comparative advantage. Finally, we examine an aspect of education policy concerning the spread of human capital across the student population.

Costly Distortion of Information in Agency Problems

Anecdotal evidence suggests that agents often spend resources distorting information transmitted to principals. We present a model where costly information distortion emerges as equilibrium behavior. The information structure we focus on is intermediate between (and encompasses) the cases of private information and public information: the agent can falsify the privately observed state at some cost. Although the principal can design contracts that induce no falsification, these may involve excessive iinformation rents: falsification can be beneficial in spite of the waste of resources involved, because it helps reduce information rents. We examine how optimal contract and equilibrium payoffs change as the information structure ranges from private to public information.

Endogenous Leadership in a New Market

In this article I analyze strategic investment under uncertainty in a new market, where firms face a tradeoff between commitment and flexibility. The model predicts asymmetric equilibria under fairly general conditions, even though firms are ex ante identical and have symmetric opportunities to enter the market. In equilibrium, one firm commits to early investment and the other firm follows a wait-and-see strategy. In the ex post outcome, firms end up with asymmetric sizes if the market profitability turns out close to, or lower than, expected; firms end up in symmetric position if the market turns out highly profitable. If uncertainty is small, the model yields (approximately) Stackelberg outcomes.

The Value of Commitment with Imperfect Observability and Private Information

The idea that commitment is valuable plays a key role in many economic models. However, Bagwell (1995) has shown that commitment may have no value if there is (even a slight) noise in the observation of the leaders action, thus casting doubt on the notion that commitment has strategic value. Here I reconsider the commitment story in a model where the leaders action is imperfectly observed and the leader has private information, and I examine how it is affected by uncertainty about the leaders type and by the observation noise.

Costly contracting in a long-term relationship

We examine a model of contracting where parties interact repeatedly and can contract at any point in time, but writing enforceable contracts is costly. A contract can describe contingencies and actions at a more or less detailed level, and the cost of writing a contract is proportional to the amount of detail. We consider both formal (externally enforced) and informal (self-enforcing) contracts. The presence of writing costs has important implications both for the optimal structure of formal contracts, particularly the tradeoff between contingent and spot contracts, and for the interaction between formal and informal contracting. Our model sheds light on these implications and generates a rich set of predictions about the determinants of the optimal mode of contracting.

International Trade Agreements

In this chapter I survey the recent theoretical and empirical advances in the economics of international trade agreements, focusing on three main topics: the motives for trade agreements; the design of rules and institutions for trade policy; and regional trade agreements.

Technology Gap and International Trade: An Evolutionary Model

We propose a model of the international technology gap that focuses on two sources of self-reinforcing mechanisms in the industrial competition: (i) a positive feedback that runs from innovations to profits to R & D expenditures, and (ii) learning effects in R & D and in production. We find that, if the cost of labor is lower in the late-starter country, several dynamic paths are possible, including one in which the late-starter catches up and then reverses the technology gap. When international diffusion of technology is introduced, the system has a bifurcation structure: if technology diffusion is relatively slow, there are two steady-state levels of the technology gap, one in favor of each country; if diffusion is fast, there is a unique stable equilibrium gap in favor of the country that has an exogenous (“Ricardian”) cost advantage.

TRADE DISPUTES AND SETTLEMENT: TRADE DISPUTES AND SETTLEMENT

We develop a model of trade agreements with renegotiation and imperfectly verifiable information. In equilibrium, trade disputes can occur and can be resolved in a variety of ways: Governments may settle “early†or trigger a court ruling, and in the latter case, they may implement the ruling or reach a post†ruling settlement. The model yields predictions on how the dispute outcome depends on the contracting environment and how it correlates with the optimal contract form. We find support for a key prediction of our model using data on the outcomes of actual trade disputes in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization.