Lucas (1990) argues that the neoclassical adjustment process fails to explain the relative paucity of FDI inflows from rich to poor countries. In this paper we consider a natural experiment: using China as the treated country and India as the control, we show that the dynamics of the relative...

Following the introduction of the one-child policy in China, the capital-labor (K/L) ratio of China increased relative to that of India, and, simultaneously, FDI inflows relative to GDP for China versus India declined. These observations are explained in the context of a simple neoclassical OLG...

This paper examines how changes in urban industrial network structures explain the growth rates of labor productivity in cities. I formulate a multi-sector general equilibrium model with input-output networks of firms within a city and trade across cities. A key input to this framework is an...

At the close of the twentieth century, sweatshops remain an integral part of the world economic order. Most sweatshops are in developing countries where governments implicitly sanction them as an instrument of economic development. Multinational corporations and other advanced economy suppliers...

The production of capital equipment is concentrated among a small group of countries, and many countries import a large share of their equipment. If capital-skill complementarity is an important feature of technology, international trade may have important effects on the skill premium through...

Technological change has reduced the relative price of capital goods. Reductions in trade costs make it cheaper to import capital goods. With capital-skill complementarity, both can increase the skill premium. I construct a general-equilibrium trade model with capital-skill complementarity to...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

The article summarises the main lessons of the Bank’s 2010 conference which focused on international trade and foreign direct investment. The research is based on a microeconomic approach to the behaviour of Belgian firms, with reference to developments in the scientific literature on the...

In order to answer the pertinent question why developing countries are showing penchant for foreign capital over the last two decades in spite of its detrimental effects as revealed from the conventional two-sector mobile capital version of Harris–Todaro (HT) model in the presence of...