Acknowledging that individuals dislike having low relative income renders trade less attractive when seen as a technology that integrates two economies by merging separate social spheres into one. We define a "trembling trade" as a situation in which gains from trade are less than losses in...

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...

The risk of default that business firms face is very significant and differs widely across countries. This paper explores the links between countries' business conditions and international trade embedment and the default risk at the country level from a theoretical point of view. Our main...

We show in a multi-sector, heterogeneous-firm trade model that the effect of tariffs on entry, especially in the presence of production linkages, can reverse the traditional positive optimal tariff argument. We then use a new tariff dataset, and apply it to a 189-country, 15-sector version of...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is observed to be a predominant form of capital flows to emerging economies, especially when they are liquidity-constrained internationally during a global financial crisis. The financial aspects of FDI are the focus of the paper. We analyze the problem of...

Building on Eaton and Kortum's (2002) model of Ricardian trade, Alvarez and Lucas (2005) calculate that a small country representing 1% of the world's GDP experiences a gain of 41% as it goes from autarky to frictionless trade with the rest of the world. But the gains from openness, which...

This paper evaluates the welfare impact of observed levels of migration and remittances in both origins and destinations, using a quantitative multi-sector model of the global economy calibrated to aggregate and firm-level data on 60 developed and developing countries. Our framework accounts...

Productive factors such as human and physical capital are accumulated and trade can affect the steady-state levels of such factors. Consequently, trade liberalization will have dynamic effects on output and welfare as the economy moves to its new steady state, in addition to its usual static...