This paper is concerned about addressing a question that has become critical in international trade, during the past three decades: "What factors explain the worldwide increase in skill premiums following international trade integration and increasingly globalized economies"? I propose a new...

This paper investigates the relation between agglomeration of economic activity and the pattern of specialization of countries. We develop a model encompassing a Ricardian comparative advantage, increasing returns to scale, product differentiation, monopolistic competition, trade costs, and...

We develop a two-sector model of monopolistic competition with a differentiated intermediate good and variable elasticity of technological substitution. This setting proves to be well-suited to studying the nature and origins of external increasing returns. We disentangle two sources of scale...

Germany exhibits a strong reduction in domestic manufacturing production depth (bazaar effect). I argue that this reflects an unbundling of comparative advantage. Using a model where Ricardian plus Heckscher-Ohlin-type comparative advantage relates to fragments of production, I compare a trading...

We study how technology adoption and changes in global value chain (GVC) integration jointly affect labor shares and business function specialization in a sample of 14 manufacturing industries in 14 European countries in 1999-2011. Our main contribution is to highlight the indirect effect of...

While the role of division of labour is very important, in itself its scope for promoting economic growth is limited. This scope is tremendously expanded when division of labour is compounded with that of capital accumulation and technical progress and the interaction/reinforcing effects between...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model with endogenous specialization and endogenous theft behavior to investigate effects of theft on the equilibrium network size of division of labour, on aggregate productivity, and on per capita real income. If an individual can steal from her...

After outlining what appears to be the central principle unifying the literature of the division of labour that has been expanding during the last two decades, I highlight a set of selected research topics, which appear to me to be of particular significance and therefore deserve much further...

This paper investigates whether trade specialisation explains economies' trade performance within a Global Value Chain (GVC) context. We consider trade specialisation in natural resources, high and low tech manufacturing and business services, before and after the financial crisis. The aimed...