This study examines the effect of NAFTA, an instance of North-South trade liberalization, on returns to skill in Mexico. Mexico is abundant in low-skill workers relative to the US and Canada, and so, by the Hecksher-Ohlin-Samuelson trade model, NAFTA ought to have raised the relative earnings of...

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...

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...

We analyze an oligopolistic market where a domestic and a foreign firm are engaged in a takeover battle for a domestic competitor. Any merger or acquisition (M&A) must be approved by a welfare maximizing domestic competition agency which may or may not be prone to "economic patriotism". A...

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...

What are the factors that explain reversals in the implementation of structural reforms? Our main hypothesis is that reversals in different reforms are driven by different factors. This paper uses new reform indicators and presents novel evidence showing that (a) FDI inflows reduce the...

We examine the effects of trade liberalization on child work in Indonesia. Our estimation strategy identifies geographical differences in the effects of trade policy through district level exposure to reduction in import tariff barriers. We use a balanced panel of 261 districts, based on four...