The majority of independent nations today were part of empires in 1945. Using bilateral trade data from 1948 to 2006, we examine the effect of independence on post-colonial trade. On average, there is little short run effect of trade with the colonizer (metropole). However, after three decades...

We examine the location choices of the foreign affiliates of Japanese manufacturing firms, using a new data set that matches parents to the affiliates they created over the 1995-2003 period. The analysis is based on new economic geography theory, and thus focuses on the effect of market and...