This paper addresses the question of why the price of nontradables relative to tradables is positively correlated with income per worker. I construct a two-sector model in which agents differ with respect to managerial ability. Agents sort themselves by choosing to become a worker, a manager in...

This paper investigates the strategy changes of the Benetton Group who have been facing severe intense competition in the international fashion market since the mid nine-ties. New competitors, in particular the European brands Zara, Mango and H&M, have challenged the Benetton position in the...

There have been significant improvements in traditional trade policies in the past few decades. However, these improvements can only be fully effective when they are complemented with a favorable investment climate. This study focuses on a particular aspect of investment climate, namely labor...

We develop a model of international trade with two sources of firm heterogeneity: "productivity" and "caliber". Productivity is modeled as is standard in the literature. Caliber is the ability to produce quality using few fixed inputs. While there is no quality restriction to sell domestically,...

The HMR model extends the classical gravity model of trade to correct for the large number of zeros in the world trade matrix (export selection) and for the unobservable fraction of exporting fi�rms (extensive margin). They �find that, while omission of both of these corrections result in...

This paper examines inter-country variations and growing volume of Intra-industry trade for thirty rapidly industrializing Asian and Latin American countries in the 1990s. With rapid industrialisation, intra-industry trade in manufactured products have increased substantially. We find that...

The link between regional integration and intra-industry trade (IIT) has been under scrutiny since it has been first suggested by the European integration process. However, the lack of reliable data and the difficulty to find a robust model for IIT made this relationship difficult to prove. This...

Perceptions of international trade barriers are important in the decision of firms to export.This study makes an empirical analysis of the perceptions with respect a particular sector. Two industrial hubs (locations) were chosen. The perceptions of the firms were very different in the two...