The effects of the quality of institutions on economic development and comparative advantage have been so far investigated separately. This paper proposes a theoretical framework in which trade patterns and growth rates are jointly determined by international differences in contract enforcement...

We construct and numerically solve a dynamic Heckscher-Ohlin model in which the initial distribution of production factors in the world makes worldwide factor price equalization impossible, and leads countries to group in two diversification cones. We study the dynamics of income per capita and...

This paper integrates in a unified and tractable framework some of the key insights of the field of international trade and economic growth. It examines a sequence of theoretical models that share a common description of technology and preferences but differ on their assumptions about trade...

How far has English already spread? How much further can we expect it to go? In response to the first question, this chapter tries to identify the areas of life where English already serves as a lingua franca in the world (more or less) and those where the language faces sharp competition and...

In this paper, we present for the first time a qualitative and quantitative comparison between trade in services and trade in goods at firm level for the same country. We focus first on static features of trade such as participation rates,, firms' characteristics, heterogeneity, concentration...

Economic growth and trade liberalization since the 1970s have led to rapid growth in exports from many developing countries. The link between this expansion and the tendancy for wage dispersion in the older industrial countries is explored in this paper using global general equilibrium analysis.

This paper has two purposes. It introduces a direct approach to policy analysis in endogenous growth models - the q-theory approach - and uses this to illustrate several new openness-and-growth links that appear when we enrich the economic content of the early trade and growth models. The...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries’ growth would benefit from a reduction in tariffs and other barriers to trade. But a backlash against this view now suggests that trade policies have little or no impact on growth. If "getting policies right" is wrong or infeasible,...

We use data on wages and rents in different US cities to assess the amenity effects on production and consumption of cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of city residents. We show that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born...

We investigate the existence of wage premium due to cultural diversity across US cities. Using census data from 1970 to 1990, we find that at the urban level richer diversity is systematically associated with higher average nominal wages for white US-born males. We measure cultural diversity in...