It is often argued that if the substitutability between workers is sufficiently high, labour is better off under a centralised labour union than under decentralised unions. We show that this may not be the case in an open economy with foreign direct investment as the incentive for outward FDI is...

This paper highlights the way in which workers of different age and ability are affected by anticipated and unanticipated trade liberalisations. A two-factor (skilled and unskilled labour), two-sector Heckscher-Ohlin model is supplemented with an education sector which uses skilled labour and...

It is frequently argued that the process of skill upgrading has both worsened the employment prospects and decreased the relative wages of unskilled workers. However, workers are not immutably either low skill or high skill, and skill upgrading may offer the opportunity for workers to move up...

This paper explores the impact of offshoring, or contracting out of business activities to foreign providers, on firm productivity, using Japanese firm-level data for the period 1994-2000. We find that offshoring has generally a positive effect on productivity growth. This effect is robust to...

The paper examines the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on the survival of business start-ups. FDI has potential for both negative displacement/competition effects as well as positive knowledge spillover and linkage effects on new ventures. We find a net positive effect for the whole...

This paper analyses the role of political connections in the post-entry performance of private start-up companies in China. It documents robust evidence that political affiliation enhances firms’ survival and growth prospects, even if politically neutral start-ups enjoy faster productivity...

The world trading system in its current form aims at reducing multilateral trade barriers across the board. Indeed, the last successfully concluded multilateral trade negotiations led to substantial tariff concessions on the part of most developed economies. What, however, happened to other...

Recent models of international trade have identified product quality as an important determinant of bilateral trade flows. Yet relatively little is understood about the relationship between the characteristics of the export market and the quality of products. In this paper we examine this link...

This paper investigates the relationship between firm heterogeneity and a firm’s decision to export, using the annual survey of Thai manufacturing firms from 2001 to 2004. A significant contribution of this paper is that we are, for the first time, able to break down FDI by country of origin...

I propose a framework that takes a set of conceivable outcomes as the primitive and a prediction is defined by identifying a subset on the set of conceivable outcomes. This notion of predictability serves as an organizing principle for characterizing pattern of trade predictions in single...