This paper is about the interactions between what is traditionally considered trade policy and a narrow but important aspect of competition policy, namely merger policy. We focus on links between merger policies and trade liberalization. We put special emphasis on the topical issue of the role...

This paper investigates two explanations for why industries might become more productive over time. The first explanation, termed the real productivity case,' is one in which firms become more productive and this leads to more productive industries. The second explanation, termed the...

This paper uses household-level data from Ethiopia to investigate the impact of food aid on the poor. We find that food aid in Ethiopia is "pro-poor." Our results indicate that (i) net buyers of wheat are poorer than net sellers of wheat, (ii) there are more buyers of wheat than sellers of wheat...

The recent financial crisis in Indonesia has resulted in dramatic price increases. Using very recent data, we investigate whether these price increases have impacted the cost-of-living of poor households in a disproportionately harsh way. We find that the poor have indeed been hit hardest. Just...

Analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is important and, unfortunately, an ever more pressing need. If policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely impacted, then policymakers need to identify those who have been most harmed and the magnitude of that harm....

Recognizing that a credible estimate of a wage subsidy's impact requires a model of the labor market that itself generates high unemployment in equilibrium, we estimate a structural search model that incorporates both observed heterogeneity and measurement error in wages. Using the model to...

It has long been believed that international competition forces domestic firms to behave more competitively. I term this the imports-as--market-discipline hypothesis. I construct a simple static oligopoly model and estimate the model using panel data from Turkish manufacturing firms. The data...

We define aggregate productivity growth as the change in aggregate final demand minus the change in the aggregate cost of primary inputs. We show how to aggregate plant-level data to this measure and how to use plant-level data to decompose our measure into technical efficiency and reallocation...

This paper tries to make sense of the recent trade dispute between the U.S. and Japan in autos and auto parts. The paper argues that there are structural differences between the way that the auto industries are organized in the U.S. and Japan, and that these differences have contributed to the...

This paper provides a critical look at recent empirical work in international trade theory. The paper addresses the issue of why empirical work in international trade has perhaps not been as influential as it could have been. The paper also provides several suggestions on directions for future...