One issue the literature neglects is how outsourcing stimulates trade (imports, exports and foreign direct investment), thereby affecting political relations. However, at least as far back as 1750, economic philosophers such as Baron de Montesquieu in his L'Esprit des Lois, argued, peace is the...

Gary Becker's theory of discrimination argues that increasing competition will reduce discrimination in the labor market. We use the Colombian trade liberalization episode over the period 198491 to investigate this claim on plant-level data in three ways. First, we examine whether women are...

This paper presents a tractable formalization and an empirical investigation of the quality-complementarity hypothesis, the hypothesis that input quality and plant productivity are complementary in generating output quality. We embed this complementarity in a general-equilibrium trade model with...

We use plant output and input prices to decompose the profit margin into four parts: productivity, demand shocks, mark-ups and input costs. We find that each of these market fundamentals are important in explaining plant exit. We then use variation across sectors in tariff changes after the...