In the absence of distortionary tax and spending policies, freer immigration and trade for a country would often be supported by similar groups thanks to similar impacts on labor income. But government policies that redistribute income may alter the distributional politics. In particular,...

In analyzing the relationship between factor endowments and sectoral percapita output (the path of development), Schott (2003) showed empirically that the number of cones was neither one nor three but two, and that all countries fall into one of these two cones. This is a puzzle because it is...

I provide novel evidence for the impact of trade policy uncertainty on exporters. In a dynamic, heterogeneous firms model, trade policy uncertainty will delay the entry of exporters into new markets and make them less responsive to applied tariff reductions. Policy instruments that reduce or...

This paper provides descriptive data on the interactions of the economy of the State of Michigan with the rest of the world outside the United States. Most of the focus is on international trade and investment, with specific attention to Michigan's exports and the foreign ownership of...

Critics of globalization object to many things, some of which can be easily understood within standard economic models, but others of which seem to reflect a view of the world that economists generally do not share. This paper attempts to identify several alternative frameworks for analysis...

This paper discusses the welfare effects, on groups, countries, and the world, of fragmentation. Fragmentation here is defined as the introduction of a technology that permits a production process to be split into separate parts, with the fragments able to be done in different locations....

This paper reconsiders the law of comparative advantage (Deardorff, 1980, 1994) from an empirical point of view. I show that not only net exports valued at autarky prices but also those valued at free trade prices are needed to test the law of comparative advantage when trade is not balanced....

In this paper, we first trace the evolution of the global trading system from the 19th century to the present-day GATT/WTO arrangements, calling attention to the key roles of reciprocity and nondiscrimination, and we note how the system is now challenged by the new paradigm of global market...

If trade costs matter for trade, and if distance matters for at least some trade costs, then location matters for trade. This may be especially important for Japan, given its distance from other developed countries and proximity to a number of developing countries. In this paper I explore the...

This essay was written for the Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy. The Ricardian Model describes a world in which goods are competitively produced from a single factor of production, labor, using constant-returns-to-scale technologies that differ across countries and goods. With only...