Some cultural goods, like clothes and films, are consumed socially and are thus characterized by the same consumption network externalities as languages. At the same time, producers of new cultural goods in any one country draw on the stock of ideas generated by previous cultural production in...

The commonly observed positive relationship between openness and growth is consistent with many theories of economic growth and thus does not provide direct evidence in support of any one of them. Quah and Rauch (1990), however, imply that increased specialization accelerates productivity growth...

Improved information allows home firms to rule out more potential foreign trade partners in advance of attempting to form a match. The increased responsiveness to country wage or goods price differentials resulting from this better first cut causes the general-equilibrium elasticity of...

We find that ethnic Chinese networks, proxied by the product of ethnic Chinese population shares, increased bilateral trade more for differentiated than for homogeneous products. This suggests that business and social networks have a considerable quantitative impact on international trade by...