It has been suggested that countries which export in especially risky sectors will experience higher output volatility. This paper develops a measure of the riskiness of a country's pattern of export specialization, and illustrates its features across countries and over time. The exercise...

What is the role of transport improvements in globalization? We argue that the nineteenth century is the ideal testing ground for this question: freight rates fell on average by 50% while global trade increased 400% from 1870 to 1913. We estimate the first indices of bilateral freight rates for...

This paper integrates in a unified and tractable framework some of the key insights of the field of international trade and economic growth. It examines a sequence of theoretical models that share a common description of technology and preferences but differ on their assumptions about trade...

We study cross-country insurance in a currency union with nominal price and wage rigidities. We provide two results that build the case for the creation of a fiscal union within a currency union. First, we show that, if financial markets are incomplete, the value of gaining access to any given...

This paper investigates the welfare gains from European trade integration, and the role of comparative advantage in determining the magnitude of those gains. We use a multisector Ricardian model implemented on 79 countries, and compare welfare in the 2000s to a counterfactual scenario in which...

This paper considers the impact of liberalized trade policy on child labor in a developing country. While trade liberalization entails an increase in the relative price of the exported product, trade theory provides ambiguous predictions on how this price change affects the incidence of child...

This paper explores whether one of the most important U.S. policies towards Africa of the past few decades achieved its desired result. In 2000, the United States dropped trade restrictions on a broad list of products through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Since the Act was...

In Mexico during the 1980s, the wages of more-educated, more- experienced workers rose relative to those of less-educated, less- experienced workers. We assess the extent to which the increase in the skilled-unskilled wage gap was associated with Mexico's recent trade reform. In particular, we...

Why do governments employ inefficient policies to redistribute income towards special interest groups (SIGs) when more efficient ones are available? To address this puzzle we derive and test predictions for a set of policies where detailed data is available and an efficiency ranking is feasible:...

We explore the relationship between greater exposure to trade (as measured by openness) and child labor in a cross country setting. Our methodology accounts for the fact that trade flows are endogenous to child labor (and labor standards more generally) by examining the relationship between...