In this paper, I examine the argument that free trade may be harmful to less developed countries, because such international competition inhibits the formation of a local entrepreneurial class.I view the entrepreneur as the manager of the industrial enterprise, as well as the agent who bears the...

Do trade reforms that significantly reduce import barriers lead to faster economic growth? In the two decades since Rodríguez and Rodrik's (2000) critical survey of empirical work on this question, new research has tried to overcome the various methodological problems that have plagued previous...

We use micro data collected at the border and at retailers to characterize the effects of recent changes in US trade policy -- particularly the tariffs placed on imports from China -- on importers, consumers, and exporters. We start by documenting that the tariffs were almost fully passed...

This paper shows that the results of Venables (1987) depend critically on the assumption that there are no fixed costs of trade. The introduction of fixed costs of exporting, while making the model more consistent with the empirical evidence, leads to the opposite conclusion that technological...

This paper develops a two-good, two-country model with national open access renewable resources. We derive an appropriate analog of `factor proportions' for the renewable resource case and link it to trade patterns and to the likelihood of diversified production. The resource importer gains from...

This paper characterizes and evaluates what has been called variously the new, new-view, strategic or industrial organization approach to international trade and trade policy. This approach analyzes trade in strategic environments,' those in which small numbers of large, self-consciously...

Recent analysis of trade policies under imperfectly competitive market conditions as well as in situations where trade in high-technology products is important have raised doubts whether economists should continue their traditional opposition to trade taxes and subsidies. This paper evaluates...

The empirical observation that "large firms tend to export, whereas small firms do not" has transformed the way economists think about the determinants of international trade. Yet, it has had surprisingly little impact about how economists think about trade policy. In this paper, we characterize...

Import tariffs tend to be higher for final goods than for inputs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as tariff escalation. Yet neoclassical trade theory - and modern Ricardian trade models, in particular - predict that welfare-maximizing tariffs are uniform across sectors. We show that tariff...