Whether governments clash in trade disputes or negotiate over trade agreements, their actions in the international arena reflect political conditions back home. Previous studies of cooperative and noncooperative trade relations have focused on governments that are immune from political pressures...

This paper reviews the literature on governments' motivations for negotiating and joining international trade agreements. I discuss both normative explanations for trade agreements and explanations based on political-economy concerns. Most of the paper focuses on the purpose of multilateral...

We develop a framework for studying trade in vertically and horizontally differentiated products. In our model, consumers with heterogeneous incomes and tastes purchase a homogeneous good as well as making a discrete choice of quality and variety of a differentiated product. The distribution of...

We survey research on the relationship between technology and trade. We begin with the old literature, which treated the state of technology as exogenous and asked how changes in technology affect the trade pattern and welfare. Recent research has attempted to endogenize technological progress...

We construct a model of the product cycle featuring endogenous innovation and endogenous technology transfer. Competitive entrepreneurs in the North expend resources to bring out new products whenever expected present discounted value of future oligopoly profits exceeds current product...

We study a world economy comprising two countries that may differ only in their prior experience in the research lab. Entrepreneurs in each country develop new technologies for varieties of a differentiated product whenever expected profits justify up-front research costs. Research productivity...

We propose a theory of task trade between countries that have similar relative factor endowments but may differ in size. Firms produce differentiated goods by performing a continuum of tasks, each of which generates local spillovers. Tasks can be performed at home or abroad, but offshoring...

In this paper, we examine one channel through which the trade regime might affect growth in the long run. We model endogenous technological progress that results from profit maximizing investments by far-sighted entrepreneurs. Productivity in the research lab depends upon the "stock of knowledge...