The United States of America is the top trading partner of the Philippines and also the top destination of highly skilled and professional Filipino workers. This paper explores the possibility of a free trade agreement (FTA) that covers the asymmetries of the two countries in labor, services and...

This paper uses an endogenous merger formation approach in a concentrated international oligopoly to examine the effects of trade liberalization on the nature of merger incentives (national vs. international). The effects of unilateral trade liberalization on a country's industry structure are...

We explore the impact of multilateral liberalization, with emphasison distributional effects across countries. We first develop a realistic base1ine that takes into account events such as the entry of China into the WTO and the enlargement of the EU, allowing us to focus on those effects that...

Recent evidence suggests that despite opening up a country for trade, the productivity gap between developed and emerging economies often does not close. This paper examines credit constraints as one channel held responsible for hampering convergence. Specifically, we extend a Melitz and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

The Pollution-Haven Hypothesis suggests that tight environmental standards reduce domestic producers' competitiveness and give rise to their relocating to countries with more lenient standards. This paper questions that relocation is always caused by reduced competitiveness at home. By using a...

We study the optimal combination of corporate tax rate and tax base in a model of a small open economy with heterogeneous firms. We show that it is optimal for the small country's government to effectively subsidize capital inputs by granting a tax allowance in excess of the true costs of...

Trade liberalization is no Pareto-improvement - there are winners (high-skilled) and losers (low-skilled). To compensate the losers the government is assumed to introduce unemployment benefits (UB). These benefits are financed by either a wage tax, a payroll tax, or a profit tax. Using a...

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium model with two countries that differ in the centralization of union wage setting. Being interested in the consequences of openness, we show that, in the short-run, trade increases welfare and employment in both locations, and it raises...

The contribution of this paper is to derive an optimal redistribution scheme for trade gains in the case of a government's objective function that explicitly accounts for the equity-efficiency trade-off. The government pays unemployment benefits (UB) either financed by a wage tax, a payroll tax...