The paper documents the large cross-country differences in labor institutions that make them a candidate explanatory factor for the divergent economic performance of countries and reviews what economists have learned about the effects of these institutions on economic outcomes. It identifies...

This paper assesses the impacts of the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) on trade in both goods and services among members using a gravity model applied to a panel dataset covering 20 OECD countries over the period 1996-2008 for trade in goods and 1999-2008 for trade in services. The...

Large population / rapidly growing economies such as China and India have argued that in the upcoming UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen, any emission reduction targets they take on should be based on their intensity of emissions (emissions/$GDP) on a target date not the level of emissions. They...

We develop a framework in which the host country productivity has a positive effect on the intensive margin (the size of FDI flows), but only an ambiguous effect on the extensive margin (the likelihood of FDI flows to occur). The source-country productivity has a negative effect on the extensive...

This paper estimates the effect of changing union density on earnings differentials and inequality among male workers in the U.S. and on industry earnings differentials among OECD countries. For the U.S. the evidence indicates that the fall in union density contributed to the 1980s increase in...

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...

A positive productivity shock in the host country tends typically to increase the volume of the desired FDI flows to the host country, through the standard marginal profitability effect. But, at the same time, such a shock may lower the likelihood of making any new FDI flows by the source...

The paper brings out the special mechanism through which taxes influence bilateral FDI, when investment decisions are two-fold in the presence of fixed setup flows costs. For each pair of source-host countries, there is a set of factors determining whether aggregate FDI flows will occur at all,...

The paper develops a model with lumpy setup costs of new investment, which govern the flows of FDI. Foreign investment decisions are two-fold: whether to export FDI and, if so, how much. The first decision is governed by total profitability considerations, whereas the second is governed by...

I discuss the tax treatment of transborder capital income, focussing on prevailing arrangements rather than de novo design of optimal tax arrangements. These comprise unilateral reliefs from double taxation under credit or exemption systems, and treaty reliefs (largely following the OECD model...