Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing wage compression; the Swedish skill premium fell by more than 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the U.S. skill premium, after an initial decline in the 1970s, rose by 8-10 percent. Since then both skill premia have increased by...

This paper formulates an optimizing model of a small open economywith a representative (immortal) household, a firm and agovernment. The asset menu consists of domestic currency,non-traded bonds and traded bonds. There is a risk-premium ontraded bonds, which leads to deviations from perfect...

As a companion to a previous paper, monetary and fiscal policy are analyzed in (a) a small open economy and (b) a two-country world, where in addition to a fixed wage causing unemployment, countries now produce specialized products whose prices are fixed, causing excess supply. There are two...

The paper considers the response of a small, open dependent economy to a variety of fiscal and financial shocks. It also examines the influence of alternative budget-balancing rules on the response of the economy to external shocks, such as a change in the world interest rate. The approach...

This paper starts out from the observation that the export shares of firms (export to sales ratio) vary greatly among firms, and tend to be systematically related to the firms' capital labour ratios. This observation cannot be explained by the standard heterogeneous firms and trade model by...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on firm heterogeneity in international trade. A first wave of empirical findings from micro data on plants and firms proposed challenges for existing models of international trade and inspired the development of new theories emphasizing firm...

We evaluate the impact of the export promotion program delivered by the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service on various dimensions of export performance. Over the 1999-2006 time period we study, Canadian firms successfully diversified their exports to destinations beyond the United States and...

This paper develops a model of trade and CO2 emissions with heterogenous firms, where firms make abatement investments and thereby have an impact on their level of emissions. The model shows that investments in abatements are positively related to firm productivity and firm exports. Emission...