The establishment of international labor standards linked to market access within the WTO is among the proposals intended to remedy the gross violations of labor and human rights that accompany international trade and investment. Yet, the WTO Charter and, previously, the GATT are virtually silent on the potential inhumanity of globally integrated goods and services markets. Despite intense pressure from the United States and the European Union, the Singapore Ministerial Declaration (December 1996), while acknowledging the importance of international labor standards, identified the International Labor Organization (ILO) as the competent body to establish and monitor labor standards. However, advocates for international labor standards ultimately gained access to the process of rules-setting in the WTO indirectly through Article XXIV governing the creation of customs unions and free trade agreements and, more importantly, the 1971 GSP Decision permitting special and differential treatment of developing country exports.

Thus, contrary to the WTO Ministerial dictates, labor standards are now routinely enforced by the prospective loss of preferential tariff concessions and market access. We discuss in this context a mechanism for linking ILO-established labor standards, monitoring by the ILO, and enforcement through the threat of lost trade concessions that emerged fully operational in the 1999 U.S.-Cambodia Bilateral Textile Trade Agreement. Under this agreement, the United States provided Cambodia access to US markets by giving expanded apparel and textile quotas conditional on improved working conditions in the garment sector.

We also discuss the labor and human-rights issues that emerge in a globalizing world economy, the market failures that produce labor and human-rights violations, and the role of labor standards in mitigating the most grievous of consequences. We then discuss the evidence on the impact that labor standards have on trade, firm behavior and investment, and on workers, and whether or not there is a race to the bottom, which we conclude not to be the case.

We study the optimal way to select projects or agents in environments where information
arrives in well dened rounds. Examples include academic environments where review
periods are set by policy, aptitude tests such as those given by software developers to
programmers applying for jobs, venture capital protocols where the rounds of funding may
be stopped before the project is complete, and FDA testing, where drugs can be dropped
at well dened junctures. Sequential rounds of elimination reduce the cost of selection, but
also reduce the average quality of surviving projects. We characterize the nature of the
optimal screening process with and without "memory."

We analyze the impact on voting behavior of strengthening property rights over rural
land. We use the 14 year nationwide rollout of a land certification program in Mexico
(Procede) and match affected communities (ejidos) before and after the change in
property rights with voting outcomes in corresponding electoral sections across six
federal election cycles. We find that, in accordance with the investor class theory,
granting complete property rights induced a conservative shift toward the pro-market
party. This shift was strongest where vested interests created larger expected benefits
from market-oriented policies as opposed to public-transfer policies. We also find that
beneficiaries failed to reciprocate through votes to the benefactor party. We conclude that
engaging in a land reform that grants complete property rights is only politically
advantageous for a right-wing party, thus providing a rationale as to why so many land
reforms done by autocratic governments remain incomplete.

I first review some of the major influences that shaped my early years. I then relate the subsequent developments in my professional career, including my research orientation, chief publications, collaborative relationships, and longstanding involvement in undergraduate and graduate teaching and supervision.