Many business, academic, and scientific groups have recommended that the Congress substantially increase R&D spending in the near future. President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative calls for a doubling of spending over the next decade in selected agencies that deal with the physical...

There is a growing consensus among economists that extending shop opening hours creates jobs. While this is probably true in deregulating industries, this paper argues there are some deficiencies in the existing hypotheses about how exactly deregulation affects employment. First, this paper...

This paper argues that skill-biased technical change has some deficiencies as a hypothesis about the impact of technology on the labor market and that a more nuanced view recently proposed by Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) is a more accurate description. The difference between the two hypotheses...

In this article, we review the literature on the measurement of trade costs in international trade with a special emphasis on nontariff measures and in particular on standards and technical regulations. We distinguish ‘direct’ from ‘indirect’ approaches. The direct approach collects...

This paper investigates the sources and size of trade barriers at the industry level. We derive a micro-founded measure of industry-specific bilateral trade integration that has an in-built control for time-varying multilateral resistance. This trade integration measure is consistent with a...

Many studies have found that international borders represent large barriers to trade. But how do international borders compare to domestic border barriers? We investigate international and domestic border barriers in a unified framework. We consider a data set of exports from individual U.S....

Barriers to international trade are known to be large but because of data limitations it is hard to measure them directly for a large number of countries over many years. To address this problem, I derive a micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs that indirectly infers trade frictions...

Many studies have found that international borders represent large barriers to trade. But how do international borders compare to domestic border barriers? We investigate international and domestic border barriers in a unified framework. We consider a data set of exports from individual US...

This paper derives a micro-founded gravity equation based on a translog demand system that allows for flexible substitution patterns across goods. In contrast to the standard CES-based gravity equation, translog gravity generates an endogenous trade cost elasticity. Trade is more sensitive to...