While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly...

In the aftermath of the international debt crisis of the 1980s reciprocal trade arrangements experienced a resurgence. This paper examines how countertrade can help highly indebted countries to finance imports if they are not able to use standard credit arrangements. It compares the credit...

Starting with the international debt crisis in the early 1980s, the volume of international barter trade increased substantially. This paper examines how barter can help highly indebted countries to finance imports if they cannot use standard credit arrangements. We argue that payment in goods...

Many people in the European Union fear that Eastern enlargement will lead to major job losses. More recently, these fears about job losses have extended to high skill labour and IT jobs. Using new firm-level data, this Paper examines whether these fears are justified for Austria and Germany -...

Feenstra and Hanson (1997) have argued in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement that US outsourcing to Mexico leads to an increase in the skill premium in both the US and Mexico. In this paper we show on the example of Austria and Poland that with the new international division...

This paper studies the effect of competition on executive compensation. We estimate the effect of increased product market competition on the performance-pay sensitivity of CEOs, and contrast it with the effect for department managers and other workers in the corporation. We use a recent reform...