Mexico experienced a tremendous expansion of its export-processing maquila sector during the 1990s. At the same time, a large proportion of its labor force remains employed in the informal sector. Since one of the main objectives of the maquiladora program was to increase formal employment, we...

We incorporate the now standard knowledge-capital model of multinational firms in a new economic geography setting. The theoretical predictions of our model suggest that unskilled labor mobility leads to less concentration of production than skilled labor mobility does. This is in line with...

Using a novel common econometric specification, we examine the measurement of three important effects in international trade that historically have been addressed largely separately: the (partial) effects on trade of economic integration agreements, national borders, and bilateral distance....

Convex vacancy creation costs shape firms' responses to trade liberalization. They induce capacity constraints by increasing firms' cost of production, leading a profit maximizing firm not to fully meet the increased foreign demand. Hence, firms will only serve a few export markets. More...

We develop a dynamic multi-country trade model with foreign direct investment (FDI) in the form of non-rival technology capital. The model nests structural gravity subsystems for FDI and trade, with accumulation/decumulation of phyisical and technology capital in transition to the steady state....

We quantify the relationships between deep trade liberalization and foreign direct investment (FDI). To this end, we focus on the effects of Deep Trade Agreements (DTAs), and we rely on a structural framework that simultaneously enables us to (i) estimate the direct impact of DTAs on FDI, (ii)...