We develop a model to explain two-way migration of high-skilled individuals between countries that are similar in their economic characteristics. High-skilled migration results from the combination of workers whose abilities are private knowledge, and a production technology that gives...

We set up a general equilibrium model, in which offshoring to a low-wage country can lead to job polarisation in the high-wage country. Job polarisation is the result of a reallocation of labour across firms that differ in productivity and pay wages that are positively linked to their profits by...

In their famous paper on the "Big Push", Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1989) show how the combination of increasing returns to scale at the firm level and pecuniary externalities can give rise to a poverty trap, thereby formalising an old idea due to Rosenstein-Rodan (1943). We develop in this...

Over the last 20 years the trade literature repeatedly documented the trade-reducing effects of inter- and intra-national borders. Thereby, the puzzling size and persistence of observed border effects from the beginning raised doubts on the role of underlying political borders. However, when...

We offer a theoretical explanation and empirical evidence for a positive link between increased offshoring and individual skill upgrading. Skill upgrading takes the form of on-thejob training, complementing the existing literature, which mainly focuses on the retraining of workers after a direct...

We revisit Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg's (2008) famous result, that under certain conditions offshoring of low-skilled labor tasks raises the domestic wage for low-skilled workers. Our re-examination features a less benign environment where Rybczynski-type reallocation of factors to absorb...

We present supportive empirical evidence and a new theoretical explanation for the negative selection into planned return migration between similar regions in Germany. In our model costly temporary and permanent migration are used as imperfect signals to indicate workers' high but otherwise...

We propose and apply a new theory-consistent algorithm, which uses disaggregated inter-city trade data to identify a pyramidic city system with central places and associated hinterlands. Because central places possess more industries than the cities in their hinterlands, and because industries,...