This paper is an assessment of three tilts in U.S. trade policy during the 1980s: minilateralism, managed trade, and Congressional activism. It describes their economic and political causes, and whether or not alternative policy directions might have been possible. Taking as given the...

This paper studies long-term trends in the labor market performance of immigrants in the United States, using the 1960-2000 PUMS and 1994-2009 CPS. While there was a continuous decline in the earnings of new immigrants 1960-1990, the trend reversed in the 1990s, with newcomers doing as well in...

This paper examines the evolution of the Mexican-born workforce in the United States using data drawn from the decennial U.S. Census throughout the entire 20th century. It is well known that there has been a rapid rise in Mexican immigration to the United States in recent years. Interestingly,...

The purpose of this paper is to describe United States trade policy since World War II, and to assess the possibility for ongoing U.S.trade-policy leadership. U.S. trade policy has shown remarkable consistency since World War II. It has never been as purely free-trade-focussed as some...

Within the conceptual framework of the Roy model, this paper provides an empirical analysis of internal migration flows using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. The theoretical approach highlights regional differences in the returns to skills: regions that pay higher returns...

Employing a 'factor-content' model that relates sectoral growth to regional factor endowments, we find that 1) U.S. state factor endowments are reasonably strong correlates of cross-state sectoral growth in value-added, with patterns that accord well with intuition; 2) that inter-sectoral...

A supergame theoretic price-setting model of collusion is calibrated to data from the North American passenger car market before, during, and after the voluntary restraint arrangements (VRAs) with Japan. Conclusions about whether the model is consistent with the bans from the various regimes...

Over 12 million persons migrated to Canada or the United States between 1959 and 1981. Beginning in the mid?1960s, the immigration policies of the two countries began to diverge considerably: the United States stressing family reunification and Canada stressing skills. This paper shows that the...

We map United States comparative advantage between 1980 and 1995, by trading partner and region, using Balassa's export-based index of Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA). We find: temporally stable and ubiquitous US comparative advantage in differentiated producer goods (except disadvantage in...

Using data drawn from the Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. Censuses, we find a numerically comparable and statistically significant inverse relation between immigrant-induced shifts in labor supply and wages in each of the three countries: A 10 percent labor supply shift is associated with a 3 to 4...