The 1990's dealt a blow to traditional Heckscher-Ohlin analysis of the relationship between trade and income inequality, as it became clear that rising inequality in low-income countries and other features of the data were inconsistent with that model. As a result, economists moved away from...

The authors link industry-level data on trade and offshoring with individual-level worker data from the Current Population Surveys. They find that occupational exposure to globalization is associated with larger wage effects than industry exposure. This effect has been overlooked because it...

This paper studies a simple, tractable model of labor adjustment in a trade model that allows researchers to analyze the economy's dynamic response to trade liberalization. Since it is a neoclassical market-clearing model, duality techniques can be employed to study the equilibrium and, despite...

A number of authors have argued that a worker's occupation of employment is at least as important as the worker's industry of employment in determining whether the worker will be hurt or helped by international trade. This paper investigates the role of occupational mobility on the effects of...

Data from the Groningen Growth and Development Center's Africa Sector Database and the Demographic and Health Surveys reveals that much of Africa's recent growth and poverty reduction has been associated with a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This...

Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reduction in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic...

Africa's economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. In this paper, firm-level data for around 80 countries are used to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms perform significantly worse than firms in other regions. They have lower...

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...

This explores the impact of a tax reform in some provinces of China which eliminated the value-added tax on some investment goods. While the goal of the experiment was to encourage upgrading of technology, the results suggest that there was no evident increase overall in fixed investment, and...

The authors investigate how institutions affect productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) to China's domestic industrial enterprises during 1998-2007. They examine three institutional features that comprise aspects of China's "special characteristics" : (1) the different...