Mexican wage inequality rose following Mexico's accession to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization in 1986. Since the mid-1990s, however, wage inequality has been falling. Since most trade models suggest that output prices can affect factor prices, this paper...

For many in Latin America, the increasing participation of China and India in international markets is seen as a looming shadow of two mighty giants on the region's manufacturing sector. Are they really mighty giants when it comes to their impact on manufacturing employment? This paper attempts...

This paper examines the relationship between wages and market power at the firm level. We derive firm-specific measures of labor market power and present a natural decomposition of wage changes into shifts in labor market power and labor productivity. Our findings indicate that 50-60 percent of...

This paper surveys and analyzes industrial policies in Colombia, finding extensive use of productive development policies (PDPs) and despite claims of only moderate government intervention. Rarely explicitly associated with the need to address market failures, PDPs are instead associated with...

This paper explores the characteristics of the political economy process that conditioned the scope and success of the combination of fiscal reforms before and after Colombia's 1991 constitutional reforms. Using formal analysis of reforms and interviews with actors, reforms in taxation,...

This Working Paper analyzes the institutions that shape public-private collaboration for the design and implementation of productive development policies in Colombia. These policies are increasingly designed in the context of formal institutions and venues, with public-private collaboration...

This paper examines the extent to which tariff cooperation is observed among World Trade Organization (WTO) members. With the help of a simple political economy model, we show that tariffs are positively correlated with the importer's market power when they are set non-cooperatively, but...

We survey the literature on trade and development with a particular emphasis on the role of complementarities associated with trade infrastructure. The empirical literature shows that on average trade causes growth, but the relationship is far from being homogeneous across countries. Initial...

We embed a model of the labor market with sector-specific search-and-matching frictions into a Ricardian model with a continuum of goods to show that trade reduces unemployment in countries with comparative advantage in sectors with more efficient labor markets and leads to higher unemployment...