Worker industry affiliation plays a crucial role in how trade policy affects wages in many trade models. Yet, most research has focused on how trade policy affects wages by altering the economy-wide returns to a specific worker characteristic (i.e. skill or education) rather than through...

This Paper studies the relationship between trade liberalization and informality. It is often claimed that increased foreign competition in developing countries leads to an expansion of the informal sector, defined as the sector that does not comply with labour market legislation. Using data...

In a world with increasingly integrated global supply chains, trade policy targeting upstream products has unintended consequences on their downstream industries. In this paper, we examine whether protection granted to intermediate manufacturers leads to petition for protection by their...

In this paper, we show that there exists a special breed of firms that are active in both ordinary and processing exports. Contrary to the existing literature that describes processing firms as inferior, these mixed firms are superior to other firms in multiple dimensions, and hence we call them...

The impact of protection on economic growth is one of the traditional issues in economic history, which has enjoyed a revival in recent times, with the publication of a number of comparative quantitative papers. They all share a common weakness: they measure protection with the ratio of custom...

The theoretical debate over whether countries can and should set tariffs in response to export elasticities goes back over a century to the writings of Edgeworth (1894) and Bickerdike (1907). Despite the optimal tariff argument's centrality in debates over trade policy, there exists no evidence...

This paper empirically explores the political-economic determinants of why governments choose to tax or subsidize trade in agriculture. We use a new data set on nominal rates of assistance (NRA) across a number of commodities spanning the last four decades for 64 countries. NRAs measure the...