Since about a decade, we have seen a surge in interest as well as in the use of services preferentialism and unilateral services regulations. This paper provides an economic explanation of services regulation and services preferentialism, including their interaction. The paper derives hypotheses...

This paper adapts the modern workhorse model of quantitative trade theory (Eaton and Kortum, 2002) as a measurement tool to quantify the magnitudes of Switzerland's gains from trade. I find that the importance of single trading partners for Switzerland's welfare is surprisingly small. The reason...

The service sector is evolving. New services and new modes of delivering existing services have increased the complexities of services negotiations in the WTO and in FTAs. The WTO negotiations focus on market access but FTAs tend to go beyond market access to seeking regulatory commitments from...

The share of low-income countries in global exports nearly tripled between 1990 and 2015, driven largely by the rapid emergence of China as an exporting powerhouse. While research in economics had long acknowledged that trade with lower-income countries could raise income inequality in Europe...

Building on a framework introduced by Chaney and Ossa (2013), we construct a task-based model of the firm's choice of occupational inputs to examine how that choice varies with greater global engagement. We depart from Chaney and Ossa by assuming that more complex tasks are more costly to...

Globalization affects the mix of jobs available in an economy and the rate at which workers gain skills. We develop a model in which firms differ in terms of productivity and workers differ in skills, and use the model to examine how globalization affects the wage distribution and the career...

How will international integration affect welfare policies? This paper considers the possibilities of financing public sector activities (public consumption and social security expenses) by general (wage) taxation in an economy which becomes more integrated in international product markets. Even...

How does international integration affect the welfare state? Does it call for a leaner or an expanded welfare state? International integration may affect the distortions caused by welfare state activities but also the risks motivating social insurance mechanisms. This paper addresses these...

We develop a general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms, where countries can invest into basic research to improve their technological potential. These research investments tighten firm selection and raise the average productivity of firms in the market, thereby...