Fernandes explores Colombian trade policy from 1977-91, a period of substantial variation in protection across industries, to examine whether increased exposure to foreign competition generates plant-level productivity gains. Using a large panel of manufacturing plants, she finds a strong...

Business cycles are less volatile in rich countries than in poor ones. They are also more synchronized with the world cycle. The authors develop two alternative but noncompeting explanations for those facts. Both explanations proceed from the observation that the law of comparative advantage...

Productivity, and the Rybczynski effects of factor endowments, have been highlighted as the two main reasons behind the growth of newly industrializing economies in East Asia. However, empirical studies at the aggregate level, do not find support for these claims. Focusing on Singapore's...

This paper uses plant-level data to examine the impact of industrial and trade policy reforms on the geographic concentration of manufacturing industries in India from 1980 to 1999. First, the research shows that de-licensing and liberalization in foreign direct investment significantly reduced...

Recent trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements ("learning"). The authors use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized...

A growth model with multiple industries is developed to study how industries evolve as capital accumulates endogenously when each industry exhibits Marshallian externality (increasing returns to scale) and to explain why industrial policies sometimes succeed but sometimes fail. The authors show...

A large and growing informal sector is a major feature of developing countries. This paper analyzes coagglomeration patterns between formal and informal manufacturing enterprises in India. It studies (a) the causes underlying these patterns and (b) the positive externalities, if any, on the...

This paper examines the interaction between formal (organized) and informal (unorganized) plants in the manufacturing sector in India. How has the size and productivity of the plants in the organized sector affected the plants in the unorganized sector? How have informal plants affected formal...

Rapid development, a widening regional gap, and growing concentration of activities have characterized the Chinese economy since the reforms in the late 1970s. This paper examines the spatial disparities of the economic concentration in different stages of development from a geographic approach...

A major challenge facing regulators in industrial and developing countries alike is the need to strike the right balance between ensuring certainty for market players and preserving flexibility of the regulatory process to accommodate the rapidly changing market, technological, and policy...