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...

This paper exploits a quasi-natural experiment – the U.S. granting of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China after China's accession to the World Trade Organization – to examine whether trade liberalization affects the incidence of child labor in China. PNTR permanently set U.S....

I examine the effects of globalization in countries where the employed workers support the unemployed and the governments control wages by regulating the workers' relative bargaining power. I use a general oligopolistic equilibrium model of two integrated countries with two inputs: labor and...

Morocco's trade liberalization policies have promoted economic progress over the past two decades. However, effects on Morocco's local labor market outcomes vary. By combining three complementary approaches and modeling techniques, this paper estimates: (i) how trade agreements have increased...

The majority of firms in most developing countries are informal. We conducted a field experiment in Sri Lanka which provided incentives for informal firms to formalize. Offering only information about the registration process and reimbursement for direct registration costs had no impact on...

Many governments have spent much of the past decade trying to extend a helping hand to informal businesses by making it easier and cheaper for them to formalize. Much less effort has been devoted to raising the costs of remaining informal, through increasing enforcement of existing regulations....

Morocco's trade liberalization policies coincided with macroeconomic growth over the past two decades. The relationship between trade liberalization and individual-level labor-market outcomes, however, are not well understood. By combining three complementary approaches and modeling techniques,...

Cambodia's rapid economic growth in the past few decades has coincided with trade liberalization and structural transformation. This growth has been extensively associated with more employment, higher wages, shared prosperity, and poverty reduction. By combining two complementary approaches, the...

Even if free trade creates net welfare gains for a country as a whole, the associated distributional implications can undermine the political viability of free trade. We show that trade-related redistribution increases the political viability of free trade in the US. We do so by assessing the...