Existing theories of pre-emptive war typically predict that the leading country may choose to launch a war on a follower who is catching up, since the follower cannot credibly commit to not use their increased power in the future. But it was Japan who launched a war against the West in 1941, not...

This paper analyzes empirically the relationship between civil wars and international trade. We first show that trade destruction due to civil wars is very large and persistent and increases with the severity of the conflict. We then test the presence of two effects that trade can have on the...

In this Paper, we develop a two country four region model allowing for a core periphery pattern inside countries. We then examine how both the integration and the agglomeration process inside a given country affects the pattern of specialization and international trade. We also analyse how...

This paper provides evidence on the long-term impact of market potential on economic development. It derives from the New Economic Geography literature a structural estimation where the level of factors' income of a country is related to its export capacity, labelled Market Access (MA) by...

We examine the consequences of increased economic integration between nations within a region. We adopt Krugman’s economic-geography model in which demand linkages can generate agglomeration of manufacturing activity. Manufacturing labour is assumed to be imperfectly mobile between countries....

Existing estimates of power laws in firm size typically ignore the impact of international trade. Using a simple theoretical framework, we show that international trade systematically affects the distribution of firm size: the power law exponent among exporting firms should be strictly lower in...

We formulate a two-country model with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms to reconsider labor market linkages in open economies. Labor-market imperfections arise by virtue of country-specific real minimum wages. Two principal experiments are considered. First, we show that trade...

When two countries, starting from different quality levels reflecting different conditions of domestic market demand, open to trade, two possible equilibria arise. In the first, the quality leader maintains its position. In the second, leapfrogging occurs. The latter is possible only if the...

This paper studies the trade of China in the past 150 years, starting from the first opening of China after the Opium War. The main purpose of the paper is to identify what is (and was) China’s ‘normal’ level of foreign trade, and how these levels changed under different trade regimes,...

We explore the relationship between greater exposure to trade (as measured by openness) and child labour in a cross-country setting. Our methodology accounts for the fact that trade flows are endogenous to child labour (and labour standards more generally) by examining the relationship between...