In this paper, we examine the impact of government enforcement of the U.S.-Mexican border on wages in the border regions of the United States and Mexico. The U.S. Border Patrol polices U.S. boundaries, seeking to apprehend any individual attempting to enter the United States illegally. These...

In this paper, we examine the impact of China's growth on developing countries that specialize in manufacturing. Over 2000-2005, manufacturing accounted for 32% of China's GDP and 89% of its merchandise exports, making it more specialized in the sector than any other large developing economy....

This paper provides evidence on monopolistic competition models with endogenous technology by studying the effects of sectoral export variety on country productivity. The effects are estimated in a translog GDP function system based on data for 34 countries from 1982 to 1997. Country...

The returns to schooling and the skill premium are key parameters in various fields and policy debates, including the literatures on globalization and inequality, international migration, and technological change. This paper explores the skill premium and its correlation with exports in Latin...

This paper explores the links between exports, export destinations and skill utilization by firms. We identify two mechanisms behind these links, which we integrate into a unified theory of export destinations and skills. First, exporting to high-income countries with higher valuation for...

Chile has become a model for reforming economies throughout the world. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the political and economic circumstances surrounding Chile's unilateral trade liberalization during five stages (covering the period 1974-1990s),each being characterized by different...

Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political and...

Competition between opposing lobbies is an important factor in the endogenous determination of trade policy. This paper investigates empirically the consequences of lobbying competition between upstream and downstream producers for trade policy. The theoretical structure underlying the empirical...

While outsourcing of production from the U.S. to Mexico has been hailed in Mexico as a valuable engine of growth, recently there have been misgivings regarding its fickleness and volatility. This paper is among the first in the trade literature to study the second moment properties of...

In this paper, we develop a simple model of international outsourcing and apply it to processing trade in China. We observe China's processing exports broken down by who owns the plant and by who controls the inputs the plant processes. Multinational firms engaged in export processing in China...