Foreign-owned firms are often hypothesized to generate productivity "spillovers" to the host country, but both theoretical micro-foundations and empirical evidence for this are limited. We develop a heterogeneous-firm model in which ex-ante identical workers learn from their employers in...

Gains from productivity and knowledge transmission arising from the presence of foreign firms have received a good deal of empirical attention, but theoretical micro-foundations for this mechanism are limited. Here we develop a dynamic model in which foreign experts may train domestic workers...

Trade in business services has been attracting attention from academic researchers, policy makers, and business journalists. While there are many anecdotes, there has been little in the way of formal theory applied to this issue. In this paper, we adapt a general model of fragmentation of...

International trade economists made seminal contributions to general equilibrium theory, moving away from an emphasis on existence of equilibrium to algebraic formulations which enabled us to characterize key relationships between parameters and variables, such as that between tariffs and...

The structure of a multinational firm, that is how its affiliates relate to one another, is critical for understanding where multinationals locate, how policy affects them, and their resilience to localized shocks. Here, we review the two main structures: horizontal investments which replicate...

There has been much discussion about what issues should be included in international 'trade' negotiations. Different countries, firms and activists groups have quite different views regarding which items should (or should not) be negotiated together. Proposals run the gamut from no linking to...

Standards and technical regulations which govern the admissibility of imported goods into an economy raise costs of exporters entering new markets, and may have a particularly high impact on firms seeking to export from developing countries. Yet standards may also have a positive side, such as...

Economic interactions among the high-income developed countries are characterized by high degrees of both intra-industry trade and intra-industry affiliate production and sales. Similar high-income countries both heavily trade with and invest into each other. The purpose of this paper is to show...

Beginning in the early 1980s, theoretical analyses have incorporated the multinational firm into the microeconomic, general-equilibrium theory of international trade. Recent advances indicate how vertical and horizontal multinationals arise endogenously as determined by country characteristics,...

Producer services such as managerial and engineering consulting can provide domestic firms with the substantial benefits of specialized knowledge that would be costly in terms of both time and money for domestic firms to develop on their own. These intermediate services are often non-traded, or...