Cultural differences play an important role in shaping migration patterns. The conventional proxies for cross country cultural differences - such as common language, ethnicity, genetic traits or religion - implicitly assume that cultural proximity between two countries is constant over time and...

The main goal of regionalization is the creation of free trade areas and the guarantee for countries to accede to a widened market. Many studies dealing with the effects of regional free trade agreements on trade flows already exist in the economic literature and the explosion in the number of...

Our paper deals with econometric developments for the estimation of the gravity model which lead to convergent parameter estimates even when a correlation exists between the explanatory variables and the specific unobservable characteristics of each unit. We implement panel data econometric...

Two large but separate bodies of literature analyze the economic effects of international trade and immigration. Given that several factors are important determinants of both trade and migration flows, the previous studies are vulnerable to a potentially serious omitted-variables bias,...

This paper contributes to the immigration literature by generating two unique non-economic quality of life (QOL) indices and testing their role on recent migration patterns. Applying the generated quality of life indices in conjunction with other independent welfare measures to an extended...

How does international trade affect the popularity of governments and leaders? The recent backlash against globalization renders this question extremely topical. Yet, most previous work has looked for political effects of aggregate trade flows without decomposing into particular types of...

This paper focuses on how gender segmentation in labor markets shapes the local effects of international trade. We first develop a theoretical framework that embeds trade and gender-segmented labor markets to show that foreign demand shocks may either increase or decrease the female-to-male...

We bring the notion of connectedness (Diebold and Yilmaz, 2012) to a set of two critical macroeconomic variables as inflation and unemployment. We focus on the G7 economies plus Spain, and use monthly data –high-frequency data in a macro setting – to explore the extent and consequences of...

What is the optimal form of firm organization during "bad times"? Using two large micro datasets on firm decentralization from US administrative data and 10 OECD countries, we find that firms that delegated more power from the Central Headquarters to local plant managers prior to the Great...