This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically, that geographical variations in natural land productivity and their impact on the return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on...

This paper considers labor market adjustments following a large import shock in the German clothing industry caused by the phasing out of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement. Using the German shoe industry as a control group and administrative data, we study adjustments on the individual and firm level...

This paper assesses the empirical relationship between the liberalization of international trade and the economic status of women. Although historically globalization is not generally linked to the advancement of women, several recent country studies find export led growth in middle and low...

There is no empirical evidence that trade exposure per se increases child labour. As trade theory and household economics lead us to expect, the cross-country evidence seems to indicate that trade reduces or, at worst, has no significant effect on child labour. Consistently with the theory, a...

We empirically assess the effect of historical slavery on the African American family structure. Our hypothesis is that female single headship among blacks is more likely to emerge in association not with slavery per se, but with slavery in sugar plantations, since the extreme demographic and...

We propose occupational decisions of heterogeneous individuals as an alternative mechanism of explaining the distribution of firm productivities emphasized by empirical studies. Thus, we integrate the frameworks of Melitz (2003), and of Manasse and Turrini (2001) that establish the theoretical...

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...

To date, empirical investigations of trade liberalization under the conditions of increasing returns to scale (IRS) and imperfect competition (IC) have either assumed or imposed the market and productive structures necessary for such a model. However, of the recent IRS/IC models used to simulate...

While there is a large literature analyzing the distributional impacts of trade reforms across the income or skill distribution, very little is known about the gender effects of trade reforms. This paper seeks to fill this gap and investigates the impact of Brazil's 1987-1994 trade...