The First Opium War (1840-42) was a watershed in the history of China. In its aftermath Britain and other countries forced open new ports to foreign trade through international treaties. Chinese institutions of trade were abolished and re-organized under Western management, Western legal...

This paper studies the trade of China in the past 150 years, starting from the first opening of China after the Opium War. The main purpose of the paper is to identify what is (and was) China's 'normal' level of foreign trade, and how these levels changed under different trade regimes, from 1840...

Economists emphasize two channels through which import liberalization affects productivity, one operating between and the other within firms. According to the former, import competition triggers market share reallocations between domestic firms with different technological capabilities...

We study the importance of technology and institutions in determining the size of markets in five different countries and fifteen different German states. The setting of 19th century Europe presents a unique opportunity to address this issue, since it witnessed fundamental change in both...

Convergence in per capita income turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local. Global spillovers favor convergence, while a geographically limited scope of knowledge diffusion can lead to regional clusters of countries with persistently different levels of income per...

We present a model of R&D-driven growth which predicts that technology, in the form of product designs and created through R&D investments, is transmitted to other domestic and foreign sectors by being embodied in differentiated intermediate goods. Empirical results are presented employing data...

In this paper, I analyze recent findings by Coe and Helpman (1995) on trade-related international R&D spillovers. A Monte Carlo based robustness test is proposed which compares the elasticity of domestic productivity with respect to foreign R&D estimated by Coe and Helpman with an elasticity...

The paper introduces a framework for studying the hierarchy of growth factors, from deep to more immediate. The specific setting we examine is 18th and 19th century Germany, when institutional changes introduced by reforms and transportation improvements converged to create city growth. We...

In this paper, we provide aggregate trends in China's trade performance from the 1840s to the present. Based on historical benchmarks, we argue that China's recent gains are not exclusively due to the reforms since 1978. Rather, foreign economic activity can be understood by developments that...

This paper estimates the extent to which changing environmental standards have altered patterns of international investment. Our analysis goes beyond the existing literature in three ways. First, we avoid comparing regulations in different countries by using data on inward foreign direct...