This paper presents a theory of location choice that draws on insights from the incomplete contracts and investment flexibility (real option) literatures. We provide conditions under which human capital is more efficiently created and better utilized within industrial clusters that contain...

Trade and growth theories predict a mutual causation of innovation and exports. We test empirically whether innovation causes exports using a uniquely rich German micro dataset. To overcome the potential endogeneity, we need to identify variations in innovations that are exogenous to export...

This paper studies empirically the relationship between trade policy and individual income risk and uses the empirical estimates of this relationship to asses the welfare costs of changes in trade policy. The empirical analysis proceeds in two steps. First, longitudinal data on income of Mexican...

We use data on wages and rents in different U.S. cities to assess the amenity effects on production and consumption of cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of city residents. We show that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy in a small open economy under flexible prices. The paper’s key innovation is to analyze this question in the context of environments where only a fraction of agents participate in asset market transactions (i.e., asset markets are segmented). In...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of exchange rate volatility on exports among 14 Asia Pacific countries, where various measures to raise the intra-region trade are being implemented. The empirical tests using annual data for the period from 1980 to 2002 detect a significant...

The organization of production within the multinational corporation (MNC) depends on the relative factor abundance of the home country and the destination country. This proposition is at the heart of the theory of the multinational corporation (MNCs) that Helpman (1984, 1985) and Helpman and...

The assumption of internationally identical factor intensity techniques may be one of the major causes of the HOV model's poor performance. To relax this assumption, detailed input-output data are required to compute the factor intensity techniques used in different countries; however, these...

This paper estimates the agglomeration benefits that arise from vertical linkages between firms in the context of Indonesia. The analysis is based on international trade and economic geography theory developed by Krugman and Venables (1995). We identify the agglomeration benefits off the spatial...

This paper examines whether considerations about trade creation (TC) and diversion enter into the decisions countries make about joining free trade areas. Estimates of trade creation and diversion for each new trade agreement started between 1985 and 1994 are generated by comparing trade flows...