The German unification process imposed a significant price-cost squeeze on eastern firms. Important technology differences between the East and the West generated high pressures on the competitive position of eastern manufacturing firms when product and factor markets integration took place. In...

El año 2003 se cumple un cuarto de siglo de fundamentales transformaciones económicas en China. En 25 años, China ha pasado de ser una de las economías más cerradas y centralizadas del planeta a una economía pujante con un rol cada vez más importante en el contexto internacional. Este...

We use detailed data on Chilean imports between 1990 and 2005 to analyze the causes of China’s import penetration relative to other countries. China exports a wide variety of products. The growth in China’s exports, however, is mainly driven by an increase in import penetration within common...

China’s exports have skyrocketed in the last 15 years. We use highly-disaggregated import data from Chile between 1990 and 2005 to decompose the causes of such export performance. We find that China’s high export growth is mainly explained by an increase in the quality of its varieties...

The one-to-one mapping between cross-country differences in capital returns and the size and direction of international capital flows after financial integration vanishes in a multi-sector world with a laborintensive non-tradable sector if financial liberalization generates significant swings in...

Summary We use detailed Chilean plant-level data from 1990 to 2000 to study the impact of Chinese import competition in manufacturing industries. We study whether China's imports have been associated with a downsizing of manufacturing plants or whether firms have escaped Chinese competition...

This paper presents a simple methodology to estimate the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital for firms operating in perfectly competitive markets with CRS production functions. It is applied in a cross-country sample to 28 3-digit ISIC manufacturing industries. The econometric...

The paper demonstrates that two relatively unknown features of the employment cycle in U.S. manufacturing industries can provide a clue to understanding the role of sectorial shocks in the evolution of aggregate employment. First, interindustry wage differentials rise in expansions and fall in...

China's tariff structure favours labour-intensive sectors, and this is at odds with traditional theory of comparative advantage. The paper argues that tariffs in China are a mechanism for protecting technology-backward domestic - especially state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from competition...