Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has experienced a growing wage differential: high-skilled workers have claimed an increasing share of available income, while low-skilled workers have seen an absolute decline in real wages. How and why this disparity has arisen is a matter of ongoing...

A particularly serious problem of measurement is the growing transfer of intangible US corporate assets to foreign affiliates of US firms, some of which use virtually no foreign factors of production. These transfers, mainly for tax saving purposes, give rise to phantom flows of services from...

We review a recent body of theoretical literature that links the creation and diffusion of knowledge and technology to openness. We analyze two channels through which the spread of new ideas occurs: international trade and the activity of multinational firms (multinational production). The...

Network connections within MNCs seem to improve export market shares for Asian affiliates of those MNCs. In particular, Asian affiliates of U.S. MNCs export more to markets where their parent firms' exports to affiliates are larger, and less to markets where their parent firms export more to...

This paper offers four contributions to the empirical literature on global value chains (GVCs). First, we provide a succinct overview of several measures developed to capture the upstreamness or downstreamness of industries and countries in GVCs. Second, we employ data from the World...

International trade is primarily conducted by large, multiproduct firms (MPFs) that pay above average wages and exhibit high productivity. In this paper we show that if firms can invest in management technologies for identifying worker skill then they will enjoy a form of market power in the...

This paper investigates the role of individual firms in international business cycle comovement using data covering the universe of French firm-level value added, bilateral imports and exports, and cross-border ownership over the period 1993-2007. At the micro level, controlling for firm and...