We estimate the impact of local mining activity on the business constraints experienced by 22,150 firms across eight resource-rich countries. We find that with the presence of active mines, the business environment in the immediate vicinity (20 km) of a firm deteriorates but business constraints...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries- Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different...

When did Germany become economically integrated? Within the framework of a gravity model, based on a new data set of about 40,000 observations on trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885-1933, I explore the geography of trade costs across Central Europe. There...

Recent contributions on offshoring often assume that firms can freely split their production process into separate steps which can be ranked according to the cost savings from producing abroad. We replace this assumption by the notion of a technologically determined sequence of production steps....

We use unique plant-level data to study the link between the local availability of services and the decision of manufacturing firms to source materials from abroad. To guide our empirical analysis we develop a monopolistic-competition model of the materials sourcing decisions of heterogeneous...

This paper studies the relationship between export policy and food prices. We show that, when individuals are loss averse, food exporters may use trade policy to shield the domestic economy from large price shocks. This creates a complementarity between the price of food in international markets...

We formulate a dynamic game model of trade in an exhaustible resource with a quantity-setting cartel. We compute the feedback Nash equilibrium and two Stackelberg equilibria under two different leadership scenarios: leadership by the strategic importing country, and leadership by the exporting...