Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on engineering details of the production process with two extremes being 'snakes' and 'spiders'. Snakes are...

This paper examines city formation in a country whose urban population is growing steadily over time, with new cities required to accommodate this growth. In contrast to most of the literature there is immobility of housing and urban infrastructure, and investment in these assets is taken on the...

How does an FDI project affect local firms in the same industry? Competition in thequot; product and factor markets tends to reduce profits of local firms, but linkage effects to supplierquot; industries may reduce input costs and raise profits. This paper develops an analytical frameworkquot;...

Many development policies, such as placement of infrastructure or local economic development schemes, are “place-based.” Such policies are generally intended to stimulate private sector investment and economic growth in the treated place, and as such they are difficult to appraise and...

We consider a trade model combining a 2x2x2 Heckscher-Ohlin structure, monopolistic competition, transport costs, and multinational corporations. We demonstrate how the mix of national and multinational firms that operate in equilibrium depends on technology and on the division of the world...

This paper contributes to research endogenizing multinational firms in general-equilibrium trade models. We attempt to integrate separate contributions on horizontal multinationals which produce the same final product in multiple locations, with work on vertical multinationals, which...

Adapting our earlier model of multinationals, we address policy issues involving wages and labor skills. Multinational firms may arise endogenously, exporting their firm-specific knowledge capital to foreign production facilities, and geographically fragmenting production into skilled and...

A monopolistically competitive manufacturing sector produces goods used for final consumption and as intermediates. Intermediate usage creates cost and demand linkages between firms and a tendency for manufacturing agglomeration. How does globalization affect the location of manufacturing and...

A model is constructed in which multinational firms may arise endogenously. Multinationals exist in equilibrium when transport and tariff costs are high, incomes are high, and firm-level scale economies are important relative to plant-level scale economies. Less obvious, multinationals are more...

Classic trade questions are reconsidered by generalizing a factor-proportions model to multiple countries, multi-stage production, and country-specific trade costs. We derive patterns of production specialization and trade for a matrix of countries that differ in relative endowments (columns)...