Development accounting exercises based on an aggregate production function find technology is biased in favour of a country's abundant production factors. We provide an explanation to this finding based on the Heckscher-Ohlin model. Countries trade and specialize in the industries that use...

A reduction in capital tax rates generates substantial dynamic responses within the framework of the standard neoclassical growth model. The short-run revenue loss after a tax cut is partly — or, depending on parameter values, even completely — offset by growth in the long-run, due to the...

We present a dynamic comparative advantage model in which moderate reductions in trade costs can generate sizable increases in trade volumes over time. A fall in trade costs has two effects on the volume of trade. First, for given factor endowments, it raises the degree of specialization of...

We draw attention to the role of economic geography in explaining important cross-sectional facts which are difficult to account for in existing models of industrialization. By construction, closed-economy models that stress the role of local demand in generating sufficient expenditure on...

We examine the quantitative predictions of heterogeneous firm models à la Melitz (2003) in the context of the Canada - US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) of 1989. We compute predicted increases in trade flows and measured productivity across a range of standard models and compare them to the...

We present a dynamic comparative advantage model in which moderate reductions in trade costs can generate sizable increases in trade volumes over time. A fall in trade costs has two effects on the volume of trade. First, for given factor endowments, it raises the degree of specialization of...

This paper presents a new model of the domino effect which is used to generate an empirical index of how "contagious" FTAs are with respect to third nations due to the trade diversion. We test our contagion hypothesis together with alternative specifications of interdependence and other...

We provide a novel set of stylized facts on firms engaging in international trade in services, using unique data on firm-level exports and imports from the world's second largest services exporter, the United Kingdom (UK). We show that only a fraction of UK firms engage in international trade in...

Existing estimates of power laws in firm size typically ignore the impact of international trade. Using a simple theoretical framework, we show that international trade systematically affects the distribution of firm size: the power law exponent among exporting firms should be strictly lower in...

The “distance effect” measuring the elasticity of trade flows to distance has been to be rising since the early 1970s in a host of studies based on the gravity model, leading observers to call it the “distance puzzle”. We review the evidence and explanations. Using an extensive data set...