Organized labor has been politically vocal in the United States ever since the movement emerged in the late 1800s. A striking development since the 1970s, however, is its hardening opposition to trade liberalization. Labor leaders have opposed virtually all legislative initiatives since the...

The article is devoted to analysis of the present condition of WTO and Doha round. The agrarian lobby in the US is studied, as well as the history of its formation and present condition in American political system. The 2008 farm bill is subject of special attention. At the conclusion the role...

The growing divergence in U.S. employee relations is described through a review of national and state-level changes to employment protection laws. Major employment laws are reviewed, as are the significant exceptions to the laws, and exemptions to the exceptions. Major regulatory actions, as...

This paper draws on a telephone survey of 1000 workers to explore whether alternative, nonunion forms of representation appear to be filling the gap left by union decline, whether this matters to authority relations at work, and whether it may, indeed, help to explain union decline. It finds...

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is inappropriate to analyze the duration of trade with continuous-time models such as the Cox...

There has been great focus in the recent trade theory literature on the introduction of firm heterogeneity into trade models. However, these models tend to rely heavily on symmetry assumptions and assume melting iceberg transport costs as the only form of trade restrictions. Moreover, a standard...

This paper is the first application of the singular value decomposition in general equilibrium theory. Every technology matrix can be decomposed into three parts: (1) a definition of composite commodities; (2) a definition of composite factors; and (3) a simple map of composite factor prices...

International competitiveness is often regarded as crucial for the attainment of gains from trade, which may lead policy makers to subsidize exports. This view is based on confusion between the concepts of competitive and comparative advantage. The paper argues that when comparative advantage is...

Borders have a sizable negative impact on trade flows. Given the vast number of individual goods potentially traded, this "border effect" could have two possible explanations: (1) less international than domestic trade in the goods that are actually traded between countries ("flow"), or (2)...

Economic activity at the state level varies greatly across U.S. regions, with different states specializing in the production of particular goods and services. This heterogeneity in activity informs the geographic distribution of U.S. imports and exports. Using U.S. Census Bureau foreign trade...