Unilateral tariff liberalisation by developing nations is pervasive but our understanding of it is shallow. This paper strives to partly redress this lacuna on the theory side by introducing three novel political economy mechanisms with particular emphasis is on the role of production...

Regional liberalization sweeps the globe like wildfire while multilateral trade talks proceed at a glacial pace. Why are countries eager to liberalize regionally but reluctant to do so multilaterally? The answer of the GATT-is-dead school is that multilateralism is too cumbersome for...

The European Community's economic integration by 1992 is predicted to have large economic benefits. According to traditional trade theory, the gains will come only with permanent resource migration and significant factor price changes (since in principle all trade barriers have already been...

The Covid-19 pandemic has introduced huge numbers of employers and employees to remote work. How many of these newly remote jobs will go overseas? We offer a rough quantification based on two observations: 1) offshore work is trade in services, and 2) the number of telemigrants is the volume of...

Recent trade models determine the equilibrium distribution of firm-level efficiency endogenously and show that freer trade shifts the distribution towards higher average productivity due to entry and exit of firms. These models ignore the possibility that freer trade also alters the firm-size...

Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on engineering details of the production process with two extremes being 'snakes' and 'spiders'. Snakes are...

Our paper integrates results from trade-in-task theory into mainstream trade theory by developing trade-in-task analogues to the four famous theorems (Heckscher-Ohlin, factor price equalisation, Stolper-Samuelson, and Rybczynski) and showing the standard gains-from-trade theorem does not hold...

The standard international tax model is extended to allow for heterogeneous firms when agglomeration forces are important thus allowing us to study the relocation effects of taxes that vary according to firm size. We show that allowing for heterogeneity permits a given tax scheme to have an...

A simple model of offshoring, which depicts offshoring as 'shadow migration,' permits straightforward derivation of necessary and sufficient conditions for the effects on wages, prices, production and trade. We show that offshoring requires modification of the four classic international trade...

A Melitz-style model of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms is integrated into a simple New Economic Geography model to show that the standard assumption of identical firms is neither necessary nor innocuous. We show that re-locating to the big region is most attractive for the...