Trade in business services has been attracting attention from academic researchers, policy makers, and business journalists. While there are many anecdotes, there has been little in the way of formal theory applied to this issue. In this paper, we adapt a general model of fragmentation of...

Trade theory consists of a portfolio of models. What elements might be useful in modeling the offshoring of white-collar services, or do these issues call for an entirely fresh approach? I try to identifying some of the important aspects of this phenomenon and then argue that modeling could...

We formulate a two-country model with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms to reconsider labor market linkages in open economies. Labor-market imperfections arise by virtue of country-specific real minimum wages. Two principal experiments are considered. First, we show that trade...

Classic trade questions are reconsidered by generalizing a factor-proportions model to multiple countries, multi-stage production, and country-specific trade costs. We derive patterns of production specialization and trade for a matrix of countries that differ in relative endowments (columns)...

Foreign-owned firms are often hypothesized to generate productivity “spillovers” to the host country, but both theoretical micro-foundations and empirical evidence for this are limited. We develop a heterogeneous-firm model in which ex-ante identical workers learn from their employers in...

We consider a trade model combining a 2x2x2 Heckscher-Ohlin structure, monopolistic competition, transport costs and multinational corporations. We demonstrate how the mix of national and multinational firms that operate in equilibrium depends on technology and on the division of the world...

Models dealing with cross-border acquisitions versus greenfield investment usually assume that the entry of a foreign firm into a market has effects on the outputs of all domestic firms in that market, but exit or entry of local firms is not considered. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine...

The basic gains-from-trade theorem makes a stark comparison between completely free trade and complete autarky. This paper is motivated by recent evidence that trade has greatly expanded on the extensive margin (aka fragmentation, offshoring) by adding newly traded goods and services and that...

A major role for per-capita income in international trade, as opposed to simply country size, was persuasively advanced by Linder (1961). Yet this crucial element of Linder’s story was abandon by most later trade economists in favor of the analytically-tractable but counter-empirical...

This paper argues that the theoretical foundations for the gravity equation are general, while the empirical performance of the gravity equation is specific to the type of goods examined. Most existing theory for the gravity equation depends on the assumption of differentiated goods. We show...