After a brief period of liberal agricultural policies, Central and East European (CEE) countries have begun to rely increasingly on price subsidies and trade restrictions. We outline the situation of CEE agriculture and describe current policies. Scarce government funds could be better used to...

A new round of WTO negotiations on agriculture, services and perhaps some other issues is expected to be launched in late 1999. To what extent should those negotiations include so-called "new trade agenda" items aimed at ensuring that domestic regulatory policies do not discriminate against...

Agricultural support is often advocated as a means to national security. This is misguided. At current levels of consumption there is considerable scope for substitution away from food without catastrophic welfare losses, and even in the total absence of imports the United Kingdom could feed...

An interesting puzzle is that trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s has been associated with a sharp increase in the skill premium in both developed and developing countries. This is in contrast with neoclassical theory, according to which trade should increase the relative return of the...

We study the response of regional employment and nominal wages to trade liberalization, exploiting the natural experiment provided by the opening of Central and Eastern European markets after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Using data for Austrian municipalities, we examine differential...

Many new exporters give up exporting very shortly, despite substantial entry costs; others shoot up foreign sales and expand to new destinations. We develop a model based on experimentation to rationalize these and other dynamic patterns of exporting firms. We posit that individual export...

A firm's productivity depends on how production is organized given the level of demand for its product. To capture this mechanism, we develop a theory of an economy where firms with heterogeneous demands use labor and knowledge to produce. Entrepreneurs decide the number of layers of management...

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects investments in R&D at the firm level. In a model where entrepreneurs are heterogeneous in their wealth endowment, they rely differently on external funds. In the presence of capital market imperfections, this implies heterogeneous access to...

This paper uses a monopolistic competitive framework with many sectors to study the impact of trade liberalization on local and global emissions. We focus on the interplay of the pollution haven effect and the home market effect and show how a large-market advantage can counterbalance a high...