This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...

The aim of the research presented in this paper is to assess the competitive potential of Polish agriculture (potential competitiveness) and the competitive position of the Polish agri-food sector on the Single European Market (SEM) with reference to the global context. The conducted research...

A country or firm's position in the value chain will largely depend on its comparative advantage, and therefore the mix of skills and resource endowments it brings to international production. For some, this might initially involve specialising in the labour intensive segments while others may...

This volume was prepared by Inga Heiland while she was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in July 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It comprises five chapters addressing one or more aspects of international trade and...

We investigate theoretically and empirically the competitive effects of increased trade on prices, productivity and markups. Using disaggregated data for EU manufacturing over the period 1988-2000 we find increased openness exerts a negative and significant impact on sectoral prices. Increased...

We construct a new database which covers production and trade in 136 primary commodities and 24 manufacturing and service sectors for 145 countries. Using this new more granular data, we estimate spillover effects from plausible trade fragmentation scenarios in a new multi-country, multi-sector,...

Despite the strong pace of globalization, the distance effect on trade is persistent or even growing over time (Disdier and Head, 2008). To solve this distance puzzle, we use the recently developed gravity equation estimator from Helpman, Melitz and Rubinstein (2008), HMR henceforth. Using three...

We present, extend and estimate a model of international trade with firm heterogeneity in the tradition of Melitz (2003) and Melitz and Ottaviano (2005). The model is constructed to yield testable implications for the dynamics of international prices, productivity levels and markups as functions...

This paper sets up a general equilibrium model, in which firms are heterogeneous due to productivity differences and workers have fairness preferences and hence provide full effort only if their factor return is sufficiently high. With the wage considered to be fair by workers depending on the...