Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...

Immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variations across US states for the period 1970 to 2005, we quantify the impact of immigrants on intermediate goods...

We measure the impact of low cost transport by rail in Malawi on the dispersion of agricultural commodities prices across markets, by exploiting the quasi experimental design of the nearly total collapse of domestic trade by rail in January 2003, due to the destruction of a railway bridge at...

With the advent of globalization, economic and financial interactions among countries have become widespread. Given technological advancements, the factors of production can no longer be considered to be just labor and capital. In the pursuit of economic growth, every country has sensibly...

This paper studies whether credit constraints affect the decision of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) to upgrade the quality of their exported output with respect to the one sold domestically. We use a detailed firm-level data-set on Italian SMEs reporting information on output...

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity (TFP) in Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000-2008. The Brazilian experience is instructive as it is a case of an economy that expanded aggregate exports significantly, but with stagnant aggregate TFP...

Foreign economic activity is a major determinant of export development. This paper presents an indicator for now- and forecasting exports, which is based on survey data that captures foreign economic performance. We construct an indicator by weighting foreign PMIs of Switzerland's main trading...

This paper provides first firm-level evidence on the links between income inequality within a country and the patterns of trade and export prices. We identify a theoretical mechanism behind these links, which relates income inequality to product quality and prices using a simple demand...

This paper empirically investigates the effects of offshoring on innovation in a sample of 18 developed countries. Offshoring of services relates positively to innovation whereas offshoring of manufacturing depicts a negative relation with innovation. Solely offshoring manufacturing to...

In this paper we analyse the manufacturing sector's capacity to mitigate increasing import competition from China. In our view, competition exposure is endogenous, i.e. influenced by firms' decisions which products are sold and what markets are served. We construct a counterfactual competition...