A country or firm's position in the value chain will largely depend on its comparative advantage, and therefore the mix of skills and resource endowments it brings to international production. For some, this might initially involve specialising in the labour intensive segments while others may...

This paper provides a systematic, quantitative analysis of the short-run and long-run effects of various trade-restricting policies in the presence of global value chains and multinational production. Using a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with endogenous firm entry and...

Was the collapse of world trade between 1928 and 1937 caused by higher transport costs, increased protectionism or the collapse of the gold standard? Using recent advances in the estimation of gravity equations, I examine the partial and general equilibrium effects of bilateral distance,...

The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries whose joint gross domestic products (GDPs) account for 36 percent of world GDP and whose mutual trade accounts for approximately 24 percent of world trade. As for most proposed free trade...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

The welfare effects of Brexit on the UK, the EU27 and the rest of the world are analysed in a model of international trade under oligopoly. A hard Brexit where the UK trades according to WTO rules is shown to decrease total UK welfare, to have an ambiguous effect on total EU27 welfare, and to...

This paper contributes to analysis of the extent to which multilateral trading agreements reached under GATT can liberalize the world economy. Its main conclusion is that free trade is not sustainable if production is fixed exogenously and utility is non-transferable. If production is fixed and...

This paper investigates the contractual choice between exclusive dealing and common agency in a simple international oligopoly model where products are sold through intermediaries. We find that when trade barriers are high domestic firms tend to adopt exclusive dealing contracts, whereas trade...

Trade economists traditionally study the effect of lower variable trade costs. While increasingly important politically, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) have received less attention. Viewing TBTs as fixed regulatory costs related to the entry into export markets, we use a model with...