This article estimates the effect of visa restrictions on bilateral trade flows and foreign direct investment (FDI) stocks. By raising the costs of travel and deterring some visitors, visa restrictions hamper personal contact across borders, which is detrimental to trade and FDI. Employing a...

In contemporary times, hundi has collected countless labels; the international press has spurned innumerable villainous descriptions, the bulk of which have helped to perpetuate a dense fog of notoriety. The critical problem lies in definition. As there is an incomplete understanding of hundi's...

We examine trends in wage inequality in the US and other countries over the past four decades. We show that there has been a secular increase in the 90-50 wage differential in the US and the UK since the late 1970s. By contrast the 50-10 differential rose mainly in the 1980s and flattened or...

This paper describes and explains some of the principal trends in the wage and skilldistribution in recent decades. There have been sharp increases in wage inequality across theOECD, beginning with the US and UK at the end of the 1970s. A good fraction of thisinequality growth is due to...

In a general equilibrium product-cycle model, lower trade barriers in-crease Southern purchasing power, which lifts long-run growth by increasing the profit from innovation. In the short run, factors of production must be reallocated inside firms, which lowers the opportunity cost of innovation,...

Since a speech by the Prime Minister in January 2013 , the Conservative party has been committed to holding a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU) in 2017. So this is a good moment to consider what would be the likely economic effects on the UK from such a move...

In recent years, the economics of migration literature has shown a substantial growth in papers exploring host country impacts beyond the labour market. Specifically, researchers have begun to shift their attention from labour market and fiscal changes, towards exploring what we might call...

The process of economic integration over the past two decades has been accompanied by an expanding income wedge between skilled and unskilled workers in many developing countries. This was also the case for Ugandan wage employees during the 1990s, which was a period of abrupt trade opening and...

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winners from growing Chinese demand for commodities. Using census data for...

European colonialism had two key economic aspects: the extraction of colonial wealth by colonizers, and the relevance of trade for colonial economies. I build a simple model of colonialism which puts these two elements at centre stage. By controlling policy in the colony, the colonizer can...