The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth....

A number of studies have tried to gauge the effect of international trade on the rising U.S. skill premium by examining whether product prices in unskill-intensive sectors have fallen relative to prices in skill-intensive sectors. However, these studies do not estimate what share of domestic...

We use retail transaction prices for a multinational retailer to examine the extent and permanence of violations of the law of one price (LOOP). For identical products, we find typical deviations of twenty to fifty percent, though there is muted evidence for convergence over time. Such...

This paper explores the role of knowledge flows and productivity growth by linking direct survey data on knowledge flows to firm-level data on TFP growth. Our data measure the information flows often considered important, especially by policy-makers, such as from within the firm and from...

The impact of an economic shock depends both on its severity and the resilience of the economic response. Resilience can include the ability to relocate factors, for example, even when new technologies or skills are not yet at the ready. This resilience per se buffers production and has an...

Are there productivity spillovers from FDI to domestic firms, and, if so, how much should host countries be willing to pay to attract FDI? To examine these questions we use a plant-level panel covering U.K. manufacturing from 1973 through 1992. Across a wide range of specifications, we estimate...

This paper examines whether the sector bias of skill-biased technical change (sbtc) explains changing skill premia within countries in recent decades. First, using a two-factor, two-sector, two-country model we demonstrate that in many cases it is the sector bias of sbtc that determines sbtc's...

Firms that export or, even more so, are part of a multinational enterprise tend to exhibit higher productivity than their purely domestic counterparts. To better understand this correlation, we incorporate the perspective of industrial organization that one of the main drivers of differences in...