The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) provides a unique window on the effects of trade liberalization. It was an unusually clean trade policy exercise in that it was not bundled into a larger package of macroeconomic or market reforms. This paper uses the 1989-96 Canadian FTA experience to...

This paper makes three observations about international trade and immigration. (i)" Borjas has argued that immigration may yield a net social benefit even though it hurts those less-skilled workers who directly compete with immigrants. I show that this closed-economy" argument unravels when...

This thesis groups three papers examining the role of multi-location firms in the geographic diffusion of knowledge. The first chapter examines whether a firm's headquarters can tap into the knowledge pool in a remote location through FDI. Using U.S. patent data, I show that an R&D headquarters...

The rising prominence of intra-industry trade and huge multinationals has transformed the way economists think about the gains from trade. In the past, we focused on gains that stemmed either from endowment differences (wheat for iron ore) or inter-industry comparative advantage (David Ricardo's...

We show that the "skill bias" of a country's tariff structure is positively correlated with long-term per capita GDP growth. Testing for causal mechanisms, we find evidence consistent with the existence of real benefits from tariffs focused in skill-intensive industries. However, this only...

The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) provides a unique window onto the effects of a reciprocal trade agreement on an industrialized economy (Canada). For industries that experienced the deepest Canadian tariff cuts, employment fell by 12 percent and labour productivity rose by 15 percent...

Developing and newly industrialized countries that have experienced the sharpest increases in wage inequality are those whose export shares have shifted towards more skill-intensive goods. We argue that this can be explained by technological catch-up. We develop this insight using a model that...

Increasingly, a small number of lowwage countries such as China, India and Mexico are involved in incremental innovation. That is, they are responsible for resolving productionline bugs and suggesting product improvements. We provide evidence of this new phenomenon and develop a model in which...