Recent empirical studies confirm a positive relationship between trade liberalization or trade openness and the quality of domestic economic institutions. An isolated analysis of trade openness per se, however, may grossly simplify the mechanisms at work, as the linkage between open trade and...

This paper focuses on the ability of the labor market to correctly match heterogeneous workers to jobs within a given industry and the role that globalization plays in that process. Using matched worker-firm data from Sweden, we find strong evidence that openness improves the matching between...

Migration has been associated with higher levels of trade. Previous studies interpret this as evidence of migrants’ ability to lower trade costs. Nevertheless, no study has investigated the impact of migrants on firms’ foreign trade. Thus, they fail to both provide evidence on the role that...

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is inappropriate to analyze the duration of trade with continuous-time models such as the Cox...

In the existing literature, the duration of trade has typically been analyzed using either descriptive Kaplan-Meier methods or a Cox regression approach. While the latter has the advantage of allowing for explanatory variables, it is designed for the analysis of continuous duration times,...

Recent theoretical analysis suggests that a reduction in the cost of exporting increases the degree of assortative matching between workers and firms in export-oriented industries. Changes that reduce the cost of imports have an ambiguous impact on matching. We combine detailed Swedish matched...

Recent literature suggests that product characteristics assert different distance sensitivity on trade flows. But the empirical evidences still find conflicting results. Previous studies have examined the effect of distance on the export decisions across different product groups at the aggregate...

In endeavouring to explain the empirical puzzle that the sunk costs of exporting are important, but that, at the same time, trade flows do not, on average, survive for very long, this paper explores the concepts of core and peripheral markets. First, it illustrates that if the importance of sunk...

Engagement in foreign markets can have an impact on firm organization and on the type of occupations that a firm needs. We examine the effect of globalization on the occupational mix using detailed Swedish data that cover all firms and a representative sample of the labor force for 1997-2005. We...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, against the background of an existing empirical literature on the duration of trade which has found that international trade is often of strikingly short duration, we aim to establish whether or not EU imports from the rest of the world also are...