Although firms may face radically different production conditions, this dimension of firm heterogeneity is often overlooked. We model input demand across local factor markets, explicitly considering search costs which explain why firms care about both the price and availability of inputs. The...

The paper is devoted to an econometric analysis of learning foreign languages in all parts of the world. Our sample covers 193 countries and 13 important languages. Four factors significantly explain learning, two of which affect the broad decision to learn, while two concern as well the choice...

We study the effect of international trade and freeness of trade (openness) on interregional inequality within countries. We estimate a model derived from a structural economic-geography approach in which interregional inequality depends on weighted trade shares and trade costs. In addition to...

This paper studies the evolution of trade freeness and of the agglomeration of production, as well as their relationship, at the sectoral level in a group of EU countries. Our main objective is to test at the sectoral level the conclusions of previous aggregate analyses which find that an...

This paper estimates the effects of the EU enlargements in the 2000s for trade in parts and components and trade in final goods separately. A gravity model is applied to disaggregated trade data over the period 1999-2009 for trade between EU and OECD countries. The estimation approach accounts...

This paper proposes methods to incorporate firm heterogeneity in the standard IO-table based approach to portray the domestic segment of global value chains in a country. Using Chinese firm census data for both manufacturing and service sectors, along with constrained optimization techniques, we...

Do firms in developing countries shift trade towards developed economies as a result of high economic growth? The matched customs-manufacturing firm data used in this study confront this hypothesized link with empirical evidence. Our analysis reveals a rising low-income country trade share...

It has been argued that a depletable resource owner might optimally increase near-term supply in response to environmental policies promoting the development of alternative resources, which might render climate policy ineffective or even counterproductive. This paper empirically confirms this...

With the availability of international value added trade data it has become evident that gross export data and value added data do not provide the same information. Although gross exports crosses national borders and is the target of trade policy, value added data tell us what fragment in the...

The research on the location choice for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is traditionally restricted to a choice between countries. The within-country location choice is less prominent in the literature. If within-country location decisions are considered it is mostly limited to Greenfield...