We return to a familiar topic in international trade, comparative advantage, introducing it into a model of economic geography. We provide a clear counterexample to the familiar result that trade liberalization leads to increased industrial concentration. Instead, lower trade costs may lead to a...

The growth of the Italian economy over the past 150 years since unification was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the country’s integration with European and global commodity markets: foreign trade in the long run grew on average faster than the overall economy. Behind the dynamics of...

We study the determinants of comparative advantage in polluting industries. We combine data on environmental policy at the country level with data on pollution intensity at the industry level to show that countries with laxer environmental regulation have a comparative advantage in polluting...

Freshwater scarcity is bound to be a major challenge of the 21st century. Drawing on newly available data, I investigate to what extent countries make efficient use of the very uneven water resources on a global scale. In particular, I find that countries that are relatively water abundant tend...

New developments in the world economy have triggered research designed to better understand the changes in trade and investment patterns, and the reorganization of production across national borders. Although traditional trade theory has much to offer in explaining parts of this puzzle, other...

This Paper studies the evolution of sectoral labour concentration in relation to the level of per capita income. We show that various measures of sectoral concentration follow a U-shaped pattern across a wide variety of data sources: countries first diversify, in the sense that labour is spread...

What is the impact of Chinese import competition on Nordic producer prices? In a panel covering 23 (2 digit) NACE manufacturing sectors from 1995 to 2008, instrumental variable estimations predict that when Chinese imports capture a 1% increase in market share, Nordic producer prices decrease by...

Trade liberalization is often met with sharp opposition. Recent examples include the so-called ‘Bolkestein’ directive, which allows service providers from a given EU member to temporarily work in another member country. One way to view such a reform is that it simply widens the range of...

In this paper, we incorporate a positive theory of unemployment insurance into a dynamic overlapping generations model with search-matching frictions and on-the-job learning-by-doing. The model shows that societies populated by identical rational agents, but differing in the initial distribution...

This paper explores the implications for trade relations of the greening of world politics. It modifies the standard theory of changing comparative advantages in a growing world economy to show the effects on trade of taking into account the fact that the demand for domestic environmental...