Globally engaged firms (multinational enterprises or exporters) tend to have higher productivity than their purely-domestic counterparts. We examine a UK firm data set where we have measures of global engagement linked to innovation/knowledge outputs, knowledge investments, and sources of...

Firms that export or, even more so, are part of a multinational enterprise tend to exhibit higher productivity than their purely domestic counterparts. To better understand this correlation, we incorporate the perspective of industrial organization that one of the main drivers of differences in...

To gauge the effect of international trade on the rising US skill premium, the paper analyzes the sector bias of price changes induced by changes in US tariffs and transportation costs. It is found that, in both the 1970s and 1980s, cuts in tariffs and transportation cost levels were...

A number of studies have tried to gauge the effect of international trade on the rising U.S. skill premium by examining whether product prices in unskill-intensive sectors have fallen relative to prices in skill-intensive sectors. However, these studies do not estimate what share of domestic...

Are there productivity spillovers from FDI to domestic firms, and, if so, how much should host countries be willing to pay to attract FDI? To examine these questions we use a plant-level panel covering U.K. manufacturing from 1973 through 1992. Across a wide range of specifications, we estimate...

Do multinational firms exhibit different patterns of labor demand from purely domestic firms? Many standard models of trade and multinational companies suggest one such difference may be labor-demand elasticities. For several reasons, multinationals may have more-elastic labor demands than do...

Are there productivity spillovers from FDI to domestic firms, and, if so, how much should host countries be willing to pay to attract FDI? To examine these questions, we use a plant-level panel covering U.K. manufacturing from 1973 through 1992. Consistent with spillovers, we estimate a robust...

This paper examines whether the sector bias of skill-biased technical change (sbtc) explains changing skill premia within countries in recent decades. First, using a two-factor, two-sector, two-country model we demonstrate that in many cases it is the sector bias of sbtc that determines sbtc's...

The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth....