Using detailed product-level export data for China and a variant of the Antràs and Helpman (2004) model that includes investments in component search, we examine the sectoral determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) versus foreign outsourcing in export processing trade. We exploit the...

Weak enforcement of international contracts can substantially reduce international trade. We develop a model where agents build reputations to overcome the difficulties that this institutional failure causes in a context of incomplete information. The model describes the interplay between...

How well does the theory of the firm explain the choice between intrafirm and arms' length trade? This paper uses firm-level import data from France to look into this question. We find support for three key predictions of property-rights theories of the multinational firm. Intrafirm imports are...

Becker (1974) introduced to modern economics the idea that others care about what others think about them and derived many useful insights from this assumption. But he did not provide a very complete description of the general equilibrium of an economy in which people both demand respect from...

Bewley's condition on production sets, imposed to ensure the existence of an equilibrium price density when L? is the commodity space, is weakened to allow applications to continuous-time problems, and especially to peak-load pricing when the users' utility and production function are Mackey...

With L∞ as the commodity space, the equilibrium price density is shown to be a continuous function of the commodity characteristics. The result is based on symmetry ideas from the Hardy-Littlewood-Pólya theory of rearrangements; and it includes, but is not limited to, the case of symmetric...

This paper presents a model of international trade that features heterogeneous firms, relative endowment differences across countries, and consumer taste for variety. The paper demonstrates that firm reactions to trade liberalization generate endogenous Ricardian productivity responses at the...

Relative wages vary considerably across regions of the United Kingdom, with skill-abundant regions exhibiting lower skill premia than skill-scarce regions. This paper shows that the location of economic activity is correlated with the variation in relative wages. U.K. regions with low skill...

The paper explores the determinants of industry location across interwar Poland. After more than 120 years of political and economic separation, Poland was reunified at the end of 1918. In consequence, its industry faced massive structural changes: the removal of internal tariff barriers and...

This paper analyses patterns of production across 14 industries in 45 regions from 7 European countries since 1975. We estimate a structural equation derived directly from Heckscher- Ohlin theory that relates an industry’s share of a region’s GDP to factor endowments and relative prices....