A major motivation for the wave of privatizations of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the last twenty years was a belief that privatization would increase economic efficiency. There are now many studies showing most privatizations achieved this goal. Our theme is that the productivity gains...

We ask how barriers to international trade affect TFP when there are monopoly rights in the import--competing industries. Holmes and Schmitz (1995) show that without barriers to trade TFP in these industries is as large as possible. We study the general case of finite barriers to trade. We find...

The share of merchandise output that is internationally traded has significantly increased while tariffs have fallen. However, standard trade models have surprising difficulty linking these two facts. Trade growth slowed in the 1970s as tariffs fell relatively sharply while after the late 1980s...