Outsourcing is an efficient way to reduce a company's costs and is often necessary to remain competitive. However, the practice has had its critics. This paper summarizes the outsourcing debate that has been going on in the United States and identifies and discusses some ethical issues that...

The objective of the paper is to answer an often-asked question: if tariff rates are reduced, what will happen to wage inequality? We consider two types of wage inequality: between occupations (skills premium) and between industries. We use two large databases of wage inequality that have become...

This paper examines the interactive effect of distance and trade on international conflict and cooperation. The effect of geographic distance depends on trade, while the effect of trade varies with geographic distance. Trade reduces conflict to a greater extent when dyads are geographically...

The aim of this paper is to explore the patterns of trade duration across regions and to identify its determinants. Using an extended Cox model, we evaluate the effects of country and product characteristics, as well as of trade cost variables on the duration of trade relationships from 96...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate empirically the determinants of innovative activities in emerging countries, with particular attention to national, international and intersectoral knowledge spillovers. Our study concerns 16 emerging and 10 technology source countries, for the period...

The focus of this paper is to estimate the effect of the different types of regional trade agreements on the volume of trade between country pairs. The analysis will employ the "empirical workhorse" of international trade; the gravity model. We hypothesize that the deeper agreements have a stronger...

There is strong empirical evidence that countries with lower per capita income tend to have smaller trade volumes even after controlling for aggregate income. Furthermore, poorer countries do not just trade less, but have a lower number of trading partners. In this paper, I construct and...

Natural resources account for 20% of world trade, and dominate the exports of many countries. Policy is used to manipulate both international and domestic prices of resources, yet this policy is largely outside the disciplines of the WTO. The instruments used include export taxes, price...

Since the mid-1980s a substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO or regional trade agreements, especially the EU. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature...

One of the goals of the multilateral trading system is to enhance the stability and predictability of the environment in which traders operate.Binding tariffs at the WTO reduces the scope for their discretionary use. But, countries have bound tariffs at ceiling levels often substantially above...