The main feature of the italian trade pattern is the polarization of revealed comparative advantage in the traditional labor intensive sectors. This seems at odds with the fact that Italy is a high-income industrial country. In this paper, we argue that this peculiar trade structure can be...

The cultural and geographic proximity between two regions otherwise very distant (both in terms of factor endowment and specialization pattern) makes the wage perceived as fair in the peripheral region dependent on the wage prevailing in the core region. As a consequence, the peripheral wage is...

In this paper we analyse the dynamics of trade patterns in the six largest industrialised countries and in eight fast growing Asian economies. For each of these countries we study the shape of the sectoral distribution of an index of trade specialisation and its evolution over time. Our analysis...

We study the effects of service offshoring on the wages of Italian workers. To this purpose, we build up a novel data set combining information from two different sources: (1) matched employer-employee data based on administrative records from the Italian National Social Security Institute; and...