This paper reviews recent developments in international trade to evaluate several arguments concerning the merits of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and their place in the world trade system. Taking a multilateralist perspective, it makes several points: First, despite the proliferation of...

This paper develops a framework for the quantitative analysis of individual income dynamics, mobility and welfare. Individual income is assumed to follow a stochastic process with two (unobserved) components, an i.i.d. component representing measurement error or transitory income shocks and an...

In this paper, we empirically assess the causal relationship between trade and individual income risk and study the role that human capital plays in this relationship using a rich, worker-level, longitudinal data set from Germany spanning from 1976 to 2012. Our estimates suggest substantial...

This paper studies empirically the relationship between trade policy and individual income risk faced by workers. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, longitudinal data on workers are used to estimate time-varying individual income risk parameters in various manufacturing sectors. The...