We investigate how protectionist policies influence short-run economic growth. Our empirical strategy exploits an extraordinary tax scandal that gave rise to an unexpected change of government in Sweden. A free-trade majority in parliament was overturned by a protectionist majority in 1887. We...

This article describes the development of international trade blocs world wide from the 1950s till 2010. We updated the data on international trade flows and introduced a new trade bloc variable based on the intramax hierarchical clustering technique, which defines trade blocs on actual trade...

This paper sets up a model of trade, in which two countries with differing levels of technology specialize on the production of subsets of the global value chain. In the open economy equilibrium, the technologically backward country exports intermediates in exchange for imports of a homogeneous...

Cross-sector labor reallocation is associated with costs at the micro level ranging from the costs of geographical relocation and skill change/adaptation to unemployment. We show that monotonous reallocation paths minimize the aggregate reallocation costs in the three-sector framework (relating...

The present study aims to verify whether the balance-of-payments constrained growth approach is suitable for explaining the Portuguese growth performance during the last decades. For that, we adopt "Thirlwall's Law" that predicts actual growth by the ratio of the exports growth relative to the...

This paper studies the effects of investment tax credits on firms’ input choices by exploitinga sudden shift in the tax credit rate by firm size for manufacturing firms in Germany in 1999. I find that more generous tax credits lead to a significant increase in both investment and employment,...

From the viewpoint of an innovator a patent is a tradeoff between the right to exclude others from using the patented matter versus the requirement to disclose it. Given the sequential nature of many innovations, patent induced technology diffusion can spur technological progress. However,...

This paper presents a critical analysis of the SSG and a simulation of its effects for Brazilian sugar exports to countries such as the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) bloc. A first stage involved the identification of tariff lines (TL) for the EU and the US sugar imports from...