We investigate how tariff liberalization has affected exporting in emerging countries. We use a highly disaggregated bilateral measure of market access to compare tariffs applied in 1996 and 2006, which includes the timing of the Uruguay Round and episodes of bilateral liberalization. Our...

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium model with two countries that differ in the centralization of union wage setting. Being interested in the consequences of openness, we show that, in the short-run, trade increases welfare and employment in both locations, and it raises...

We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by destroying protectionist rents, thus making democracies last longer. This...

We introduce unemployment and endogenous selection of workers into different skill-classes in a trade model with two sectors and heterogeneous firms. This allows us to study the distributional consequences and the skill-specific unemployment effects of trade liberalization. We show that the...

What has been the overall global welfare impact of the accession to the World Trade Organization of a large country like China, or the global welfare impact of the completion of the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations? Can we come up with a simple user-friendly formula to calculate the global...

The literature on trade liberalization and environment has not considered federal structures. This paper shows how the design of environmental policy in a federal system has implications for the effects of trade reform. Trade liberalization leads to a decline in pollution taxes regardless of...

We develop a new framework for the analysis of the impact of trade liberalization on the wage structure. Our model focuses on the decision of workers to accumulate firm-specific skills, by “on-the-job” training, knowing that this means their future wages will have to be negotiated, and that...