Under plausible assumptions about preferences and technology, the model in this paper suggests that the entire volume of world trade matters for wage inequality. Therefore, trade integration, even among identical countries, is likely to increase the skill premium. Further, we argue that...

A by now large literature in regional economics has greatly improved our understanding of the determinants of the observed spatial disparities in productivity. However, this literature neglects what seems to be a robust and persistent fact accompanying regional productivity differences: high...

We show how, in general equilibrium models featuring increasing returns, imperfect competition and endogenous markups, changes in the scale of economic activity affect income distribution across factors. Whenever final goods are gross-substitutes (gross-complements), a scale expansion raises...

This paper investigates the relationship between trade openness and the size of government, both theoretically and empirically. We show that openness can increase the size of governments through two channels: (1) a terms of trade externality, whereby trade lowers the domestic cost of taxation...

We study how firm and foreign market characteristics affect the geographic distribution of exporterssales. To this purpose, we use export intensities (the ratio of exports to sales) across destinations as our key measures of firmsrelative involvement in heterogeneous foreign markets. In a...

We study the short- and long-run implications of offshoring on innovation, technology adoption, wage and income inequality in a Ricardian model with directed technical change. A unique final good is produced by combining a skilled and an unskilled product, each produced from a continuum of...

We study the equilibrium determinants of firm-level heterogeneity in a model in which firms can choose between different probability distributions when drawing productivity at the entry stage and explore the implications in closed and open economy. One novel result is that export opportunities,...

We study the incentives to improve ability in a model where heterogeneous firms and workers interact in a labor market characterized by matching frictions and costly screening. When effort in improving ability raises both the mean and the variance of the resulting ability distribution, multiple...

This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politicians perceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benefits and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters. To do so, it proposes a model of elections where...

We analyze recent contributions to growth theory based on the model of expanding variety of Romer (1990). In the first part, we present different versions of the benchmark linear model with imperfect competition. These include the "lab equipment" model, "labor-for-intermediates" and "directed...