Despite economists' nearly universal support for free trade policies, the general public has serious reservations about free trade. To understand this opposition, one must understand the preferences of individuals as they relate to the policy choices of policymakers. Ideally, one would like to...

The trade liberalization associated with NAFTA has affected the pattern of state exports by altering the origin as well as the destination of merchandise exports. We find that NAFTA has increased US merchandise exports to Mexico and Canada by just over 15 percent, and has increased total US...

There is a well-established literature finding that the Canada-U.S. border has a large dampening effect on trade, is asymmetric, and differs across provinces. In this paper, I demonstrate that the standard gravity model used to obtain these results provides biased estimates of the volume of...

Debates over the desirability a preferential trading area (PTA) begin with the supposition that it will have two effects on trade: it will increase trade between PTA members, and decrease trade between members and non-members. This paper demonstrates, however, that at the regional level the...

Using a self-exciting threshold autoregressive model, we confirm the presence of nonlinearities in sectoral real exchange rate (SRER) dynamics across Mexico, Canada and the US in the pre-NAFTA and post-NAFTA periods. Measuring transaction costs using the estimated threshold bands, we find...

This paper examines and compares the recent business cycle experiences of the seven states that lie partly or wholly within the Eighth Federal Reserve District (Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee). For the period surrounding the 1990-91 NBER recession,...

Presentation to the Northeast Mississippi Economic Forecast Conference, Jan. 20, 2005

Presentation to the Northeast Mississippi Economic Forecast Conference, Jan. 20, 2005

We develop a dynamic labor search model where production and consumption take place in spatially distinct labor markets with varying exposure to domestic and international trade. The model recognizes the role of labor mobility frictions, goods mobility frictions, geographic factors, and...