Because international trade theory has not provided an unambiguous prediction on the impact of trade on growth, a vast literature tried to identify the relationship empirically. After summarizing the influential large country case studies of the 1970s and early 1980s - which showed the folly of...

This paper addresses the mechanisms by which trade openness affects growth volatility. Using a diverse set of export concentration measures, we present strong evidence pointing to an important role for export diversification in conditioning the effect of trade openness on growth volatility....

Does trade openness cause higher GDP per capita? Since the seminal instrumental variables (IV) estimates of Frankel and Romer [F&R](1999) important doubts have surfaced. Is the correlation spurious and driven by omitted geographical and institutional variables? In this paper, we generalize F&R's...

This work shows the asymmetric effect of the reduction in transportation costs across different sectors in the process of the Great Divergence. Specifically, the analysis indicates that reductions in transportation costs of industrial goods enhance convergence of the growth rates of trading...

Can international trade act as the sole engine of growth for an economy? If the answer is yes, what are the mechanisms through which trade operates in transmitting permanent growth? This paper answers these questions with two simple two-country models, in which only one country enjoys sustained...

Recent empirical evidence shows that gross official capital transactions flow upstream in the international financial markets due to government policy objectives and that they account for the current account surpluses observed in the last decade in the fast-growing emerging economies. Following...

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model where innovation takes the form of the introduction new goods, whose production requires skilled workers. Innovation is followed by a costly process of standardization, whereby these new goods are adapted to be produced using unskilled labor. Our...

The paper develops a model of proportionate growth to describe the dynamics of the network of international trade flows. We show that a large number of the empirical regularities characterizing international trade - such as the fraction of zero trade flows across pairs of countries, the positive...