Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences...

This Paper presents a model of international trade that features heterogeneous firms, relative endowment differences across countries, and consumer taste for variety. The Paper demonstrates that firm reactions to trade liberalization generate endogenous Ricardian productivity responses at the...

The paper explores the influence of job security provisions on employment and unemployment. We show that this influence depends on the persistence of the macroeconomic fluctuations to which the labour market is exposed, and on employees’ bargaining power in wage negotiations. Specifically,...

This paper provides a brief, non-technical survey of the major theories about why people remain unemployed. The aim is to provide a macroeconomic perspective on the microeconomic problem of why people don't find work. The first section deals with market-clearing theories: the natural rate...

This paper formulates a structural empirical model of heterogeneous firms whose workers exhibit fair-wage preferences. In the underlying theoretical framework, such preferences lead to a link between a firm's operating profits on the one hand and wages of workers employed by this firm on the...

We formulate a two-country model with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms to reconsider labor market linkages in open economies. Labor-market imperfections arise by virtue of country-specific real minimum wages. Two principal experiments are considered. First, we show that trade...

This Paper presents a new approach to the theory of the firm by identifying factor complementarities as central to the determination of the firm’s boundaries. The factor complementarities may take a variety of forms: technological and informational complementarities, as well as economies of...

Relative wages vary considerably across regions of the United Kingdom, with skill-abundant regions exhibiting lower skill premia than skill-scarce regions. This Paper shows that the location of economic activity is correlated with the variation in relative wages. UK regions with low skill premia...

This Paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

This paper provides a brief overview of the East German employment problem and presents a simple model in which to evaluate two rival policy proposals: wage subsidies and revenue-sharing subsidies. Revenue-sharing subsidies have received little, if any, attention in the ongoing public debate on...