Recent theories and empirics suggest that trade openness increases production fragmentation across countries. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between trade openness and firms’ choice of vertical structure. We find supportive, firm-level evidence that upon trade liberalization,...

"Existing studies on the impact of outsourcing on relative wages and the demand for skilled workers mainly focus on aggregate outsourcing, in which imported intermediate inputs are used as a proxy. We depart from the existing studies by focusing on various types of outsourcing based on the...

The proliferation of overlapping free trade agreements (FTA) in recent years has led to pair-wise hub-and-spokes (HAS) throughout the world. Being avid subscribers to FTAs, many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including the United States, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and...

We investigate the linkages among outsourcing activities, labour productivity and wage inequality for skilled and unskilled labour by employing a primal approach that involves estimating a nested constant elasticity of substitution production function, using six-digit North American Industry...

Extending Krugman’s (1991) economic geography model, this paper examines the stability of an industrial structure resulting from the production shifting-in effect of the formation of regional trade agreements. This paper claims that nonhigher external trade costs against non-member countries...

In educating students national public school systems use different methods of grouping students by ability across schools. We consider four different school systems of student allocation at different stages of schooling and their educational implications. Our two-period model suggests that both...

Recent theories and empirics suggest that trade openness increases world trade through production fragmentation across countries. In this paper we focus on the relationship between trade openness and firms¡¯ choices of vertical structure. We find firm-level data evidence that upon trade...

This paper examines the role of firm heterogeneity in the choice made by multinationals with regards to FDI type and location. Using Korean firm-level data, we find that highly productive firms are more likely than their less efficient counterparts to invest in tough markets and choose combined...

According to the WTO data for regional trade agreements (RTA), the number of RTA has been exponentially growing since the middle of the 1990s. As a result, many countries these days have had more than one free trade partner country. In this paper, we attempt to find out statistically important...