This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...

Trade liberalization is no Pareto-improvement - there are winners (high-skilled) and losers (low-skilled). To compensate the losers the government is assumed to introduce unemployment benefits (UB). These benefits are financed by either a wage tax, a payroll tax, or a profit tax. Using a...

Arkolakis, Costinot and Rodriguez-Clare (ACR, 2012) prove that, conditional on the change in openness, the welfare gains from foreign trade reforms are quantitatively identical across single-sector trade models with radically different micro-foundations. We generalize this result to domestic and...

This thesis is a collection of three essays in international trade. The thesis broadly addresses various aspects of trade related policies and their effects on consumer welfare. In the first chapter, I examine how global trade liberalization would affect different consumers and countries in...