The US labour market has experienced a remarkable polarization in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, recent empirical work has documented a sharp increase in the wealth to income ratio in that period. Contemporary to these inequality trends, the US faced a fast technological catch-up as European...

We explore whether the global financial crisis has had heterogeneous effects on traded goods differentiated by quality. Combining a dataset of Argentinean firm-level destination-specific wine exports with quality ratings, we show that higher quality exports grew faster before the crisis, but...

We show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over environmental standards and taxes, the developing country may have a ‘second-mover advantage.' In our model, firms do not unanimously prefer lower environmental-standard levels. We introduce this feature to...

China's growth strategy as set out in the 11th 5-year plan in 2005 called for upgrading of product quality, the development of an innovation society, and reduced reliance on foreign intellectual property with high license fees. Consistent with this policy, China has been involved in recent years...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

Past empirical failures of the basic Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) model related to the inability of data to meet its restrictive assumptions, particularly identical international technologies and factor price equalization. Trefler (1993) tried to resuscitate HOV by introducing a simple...

We extend the trade restrictiveness index approach to the case of market imperfections and domestic regulations addressing them. We focus on standard-like non-tariff measures (NTMs) affecting cost of production and potentially enhancing demand by reducing negative externalities. We apply the...

This paper sets up a general equilibrium model, in which firms are heterogeneous due to productivity differences and workers have fairness preferences and hence provide full effort only if their factor return is sufficiently high. With the wage considered to be fair by workers depending on the...

To many economists the public's support for the minimum wage (MW) institution is puzzling, since the MW is considered a “blunt instrument” for redistribution. To delve deeper in this issue we build models in which workers are heterogeneous in ability. In the first model, the government does...