It is a well-established theoretical result that the trade policy of a large country can directly affect its own and other countries' welfare by affecting international goods prices. However, there exist very few empirical studies that analyze the effect of trade policy on international prices....

The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth....

This paper is an effort to do international trade theory without mentioning countries. Nearly all models of the international economy assume that trade takes place between nations or regions which are themselves dimensionless points. We develop a model in which economic space is instead assumed...

Using a unique firm level data set from the Chinese manufacturing sector, this paper analyses the impact of production subsidies on firms’ export performance. It documents robust evidence that production subsidies stimulate export activity, although this effect is conditional on firm...

This paper considers the locational choice of firms in an upstream and a downstream industry. Both industries are imperfectly competitive, with firms subject to increasing returns. There are transport costs between the two locations. Depending on the level of these costs there may be a single...

This paper analyzes welfare-state determinants of individual attitudes towards immigrants - within and across countries - and their interaction with labor-market drivers of preferences. We consider two different mechanisms through which a redistributive welfare system might adjust as a result of...

This paper analyses the customs union problem in a model containing a continuum of products. The continuum is in three dimensions, so that three countries each have a distinct comparative advantage. Trade patterns are endogenously determined, and changed by policy. This is in the tradition of...

In the wake of falling trade costs, two central consequences in the importing economy are, first, that stronger competition through increased imports can lead to market share reallocations among domestic firms with different productivity levels (selection). Second, the increase in imports might...

The paper argues that East Asian regionalism is fragile since (i) each nation's industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth functioning of 'Factory Asia' - in particular on intra-regional trade; (ii) the unilateral tariff-cutting that created 'Factory Asia' is not subject to WTO discipline...

Increasingly, a small number of low-wage countries such as China and India are involved in innovation - not the `big ideas', but the constant incremental innovations needed to stay ahead in business. We provide some evidence of this and develop a model in which there is a transition from...