A major question in the globalization debate is whether outsourcing and offshoring activities are beneficial to the home country. This paper investigates the effects on productivity and trade from the perspective of transaction costs, using a recent theory on trade in tasks. A production...

This paper explores the link between trade structure, trade specialization and per capita income growth. It is argued that industrial upgrading in export specialization patterns has a positive long-run growth effect, while the effect of structural change in industrial import patterns is in...

We explore dynamic linkages between financial/banking sector openness, financial sector competition, and growth. We first develop an analytical model, highlighting links between long-run economic performance and services trade, through scale economies and market and cost structures in the...

We analyze the impact of obsolescence of economic inventions by incorporating maintenance costs in the endogenous growth model of expanding product varieties. This contrasts with the existing literature, which ignores maintenance costs and uses the model of quality improvements to describe...

In this paper we explore linkages between financial services trade and growth. We offer a formalization of the argument that trade, through the fostering of financial market integration, may yield important long-run effects related to increased competition. The relationships formalized here link...

In this era of globalization we see an increase in specialization: the production chain is

We investigate experimentally the economic effects of wage taxation to finance unemployment benefits for a closed economy and an international economy. The main findings are the following. (i) There is clear evidence of a vicious circle in the dynamic interaction between the wage tax and...

In this paper we study the implications of population ageing in an economy with a sizeable non-traded goods sector. To this effect a highly stylized micro-founded macro model is constructed in which the age structure of the population plays a non-trivial role. The model distinguishes separate...

We decompose capital flows--both debt and equity--into public and private components and study their relationship with productivity growth. This exercise reveals that international capital flows are mainly shaped by government decisions and sovereign to sovereign transactions. Specifically, we...

In this paper we identify the effects of ageing on the relative price of nontradeables versus tradeables. We consider two cases. In a first specification, age effects only account for short-run dynamics. An alternative case allows for permanent age effects. Estimating the respective cases by...