In the traditional model of international trade, labour market reforms in one country are often viewed as beggar-thy-neighbour policies, because they negatively affect the competitiveness and employment levels of the country’s trading partners. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that this...

In the traditional model of international trade, labour market reforms in one country are often viewed as beggar-thy-neighbour policies, because they negatively affect the competitiveness and employment levels of the country’s trading partners. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that this...

When the world economy was recently hit by a severe recession, governments all over the world reacted by initiating stimulus packages. Some countries (among them, most notably, China and the US) tried to put special emphasis on their home industries by including `Buy National' clauses into the...

Analyses of the effects of trade policies focus on comparisons of two different steady states, restricting the investigation to the long run. In order to account for the adjustments and to capture the relevant transmission mechanisms of changes in trade costs, such as market size, entry and...

The paper sets up a two-country asymmetric trade model with heterogeneous firms, search frictions and endogenous labor market institutions. Countries are linked by trade in goods and non-cooperatively set unemployment benefits to maximize national welfare. We show that more open and smaller...

How do changes in labor market institutions, like more generous unemployment benefits in one country, affect labor market outcomes in other countries? We set up a two-country Armingtonian trade model with frictions on the goods and labor markets. Contrary to the literature, higher labor market...

Should governments only purchase domestic goods to increase welfare? And would government spending be higher if it was used for domestic goods only? Such proposals, which we call Buy National, were discussed in many countries in the context of the fiscal stimuli used to fight the recent global...