Using confidential microdata from the US Census, we find that the fraction of manufacturing plants that export rose from 21% in 1987 to 39% in 2006. It has been suggested that similar trends in other countries may have been caused by declining costs of entering foreign markets. Our study tests...

This paper investigates the effects of both inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI) on productivity in manufacturing and services sectors. The main novelty is the analysis of the spillover effects of outward FDI that may occur outside the investing firms on the rest of the home...

The paper examines the impact of terms of trade shocks on private savings in the transition economies after accounting for the effect of other determinants. Economic agents in the transition economies are subject to tight credit constraints which are more pronounced during bad state of nature....

In this paper we investigate the export participation of Slovene firms. We first show that sunk costs are an important factor for explaining the export behavior of Slovene firms. Next we show that when the absorption power of the exporting market declines, firms still trade with their...

France has seen a marked deterioration in its export performance in the last 10 years or so. Previous empirical research pointed out that weak export performance was due to i) vigorous domestic demand; ii) lower mark-ups due to head-to-head competition with Germany; iii) low non-price...

We use rolling cointegration to measure the convergence of base money, M2, the consumer price index and industrial output between two reference countries, Germany and France, and recent EU members and some transition economy candidates. Counties that recently joined the EU exhibit time-varying...

This paper modifies the two-industry, two-country Heckscher-Ohlin model with intermediate goods to decompose trade into its horizontal and vertical intra-industry, as well as inter-industry parts. Acknowledging that liberalization affects each type of trade differently, and that changes in each...

National borders reduce trade, but most estimates of the border effect seem puzzlingly large. We show that major methodological innovations of the last decade combine to shrink the border effect to a mere 28% reduction in international trade ows worldwide. The border effect varies across...

The global financial crisis has reiterated the need for Africa to build resilience to global output shocks. In this paper we examine empirically the role of intra-regional and intra-African trade linkages in being an absorber of the global output shocks in two African regional economic...

We study the impact of skilled immigrants on the employment structures of U.S. …firms using matched employer-employee data. Unlike most previous work, we use the …firm as the lens of analysis to account for a greater level of heterogeneity and the fact that many skilled immigrant admissions...