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This paper develops a politico-economic model for use in studying the role of intra-elite conflict in the simultaneous determination of a country's political regime, trade policy and income-tax-based redistribution scheme. Three socioeconomic groups are involved: two elite groups and workers, whose preferences regarding trade policy and income taxation are derived from a simple open-economy model. The critical point is that income taxation induces a rich-poor/elite-workers political cleavage, while trade policy opens the door to intra-elite conflict. In this model, when there is no intra-elite conflict, changes in trade policy are associated with political transitions. Coups (democratizations) open up the economy if and only if both elite factions are pro-free-trade (protectionist). However, in the presence of intra-elite conflict, autocracies respond to popular revolts by changing trade their policy and reallocating political power within the elite (to the elite group with the same trade policy preference as the workers) rather than offering to democratize the country. The change in trade policy is credible because the elite group with the same trade policy preference as the workers controls the autocracy. Moreover, in the presence of intra-elite conflict, coups tend to result in the maintenance of the existing trade policy unless popular demands are extremely radical and/or the elite group with the same trade policy preference as the workers is exceptionally weak.

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We discuss the past, present and future of the structural approach in empirical microeconomics, starting with its inception in the 1970s and 1980s. Our focus is on the use of the structural approach in labor economics, broadly defined to include population economics, human capital and related fields. In the hopes to reach a wider audience that might not be as familiar with the pillars of the structural approach, we first provide an overview of well-known features, setting the stage for a more up-to-date discussion of current developments. We discuss how to identify the need for a structural model, and key steps involved in how to formulate one. We also discuss issues of identification and estimation and highlight advantages and disadvantages of this approach, including the controversial issue of external validity. We then describe the current frontier of this approach, which increasingly reflects integration efforts with "design-based" strategies. This integration provides opportunities to both, validate structural models and enhance the credibility of their identification. We highlight why, whenever possible, it is best to pursue both of these goals, reserving some of the credible exogenous variation for identification and some for validation. While quasi-experimental variation can be useful in pursuit of both of these goals, we discuss why RCTs provide a first best opportunity in terms of out-of-sample validation. We conclude with thoughts about the future of the structural approach.

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We explore the political economy of trade and migration policies in several models of international trade. We show that in a Ricardian world, free trade and no international labor mobility is a Nash equilibrium outcome, but free trade and free international labor mobility is not. The result holds under different assumptions about the set of goods, preferences and the number of countries. An analogous result also holds in multifactor economies such as: a version of the standard two-sector Heckscher-Ohlin model, the Ricardo-Vinner specific factors model, and a three-sector model with a non-tradeable sector. We also study three extensions of our model in which free trade and at least partial labor mobility is a Nash equilibrium outcome. One extension introduces increasing returns to scale. Another an extractive elite. Finally, we allow the recipient country to charge an immigration fee in the form of an income tax and distribute the proceeds among domestic workers, which induces a Pareto improvement for the global economy.

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We review, from a practical standpoint, the evolving literature on assessing external validity (EV) of estimated treatment effects. We review existing EV measures, and focus on methods that permit multiple datasets (Hotz et al., 2005). We outline criteria for practical usage, evaluate the existing approaches, and identify a gap in potential methods. Our practical considerations motivate a novel method utilizing the Group Lasso (Yuan and Lin, 2006) to estimate a tractable regression-based model of the conditional average treatment effect (CATE). This approach can perform better when settings have differing covariate distributions and allows for easily extrapolating the average treatment effect to new settings. We apply these measures to a set of identical field experiments upgrading slum dwellings in three different countries (Galiani et al., 2017).

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This article presents a comprehensive analysis of trends in the publication and citation of economics scholarly research, with a focus on specialization within fields of economics research (i.e., applied, applied theory, econometrics methods, and theory). We collected detailed data on 24,273 articles published from 1970 to 2016 in highly regarded general research economics journals. We then used state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing techniques to further enrich the collected data. Our findings reveal significant disparities in article content and citations across fields of economics research. The analysis indicates growing specialization trends in theory and econometric methods. In contrast, applied papers are covering a wider range of topics and receiving an increasing proportion of extramural citations over time. By 2016, applied ranked among the most or second most cited field by any other field of economics research. These patterns are consistent with applied papers becoming more multidisciplinary. Applied theory articles have also demonstrated a growing breadth of topics covered (similar to applied articles); however, this has not been accompanied by an increase in extramural citations or in the share of citations received from other fields of economics research (as observed with theory articles). This makes it challenging to determine their specialization status.