Estimates of labor mobility costs are needed to assess the responses of employment and wages to trade shocks when factor adjustment is costly. Available methods to estimate those costs rely on panel data, which are seldom available in developing countries. The authors propose a method to...

"This paper briefly reviews new indices of trade restrictiveness and trade facilitation that have been developed at the World Bank. The paper also compares the trade impact of different types of trade restrictions applied at the border with the effects of domestic policies that affect trade...

A model of firm innovation illustrates the effects of the threat of imitation and product varieties on a representative firm's decision to invest in research and development to produce new product varieties. The model motivates two empirical questions: (1) Is research and development partially...

"Recent research highlights the relationship between economic development and productive diversification, which may be hindered by market failures. After identifying stages of diversification in disaggregated export data, the authors develop a metric for the flows of export "discoveries," or...