This paper critically assesses the literature on the relationship between economic integration and the environment. In particular, we investigate how trade liberalisation and capital market integration affect environmental policy and thus environmental quality. Conversely, we also study how...

The Kyoto Protocol stipulates that industrialised countries and countries with economies in transition, i.e. the group of Annex I countries, shall reduce their overall emissions of carbon dioxide and other five greenhouse gases by at least 5 % as compared to their 1990 emission levels. This...

This paper studies how comparative advantage and the political elites' endowments shape long-run performance in an economy with imperfect political institutions. In a capital-scarce economy, an autocrat catering to the needs of landowners favours openness to trade at an early stage of...

We quantify general equilibrium effects of place-based policies in a multiregion framework with mobility, trade and agglomeration economies. Using detailed data on EU transfers, we infer the local effects of different transfer types on productivity, income and transportation cost. Based on these...

The conventional wisdom is there have been two globalizations in the modern era. The first began around 1870 and ended in 1914. The second began in 1945 and is still underway. This paper challenges that view and argues there have been three globalizations, not two. The first half of the paper...

This paper revisits the empirical evidence about the link between firms' performance and their international status, based on a large sample of Italian enterprises. To this purpose, we merged two waves of the Capitalia survey (1998-2000, and 2001-2003) retrieving firm level data for roughly...

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have proliferated over the past 50 years such that the number of pairs of countries with BITs is roughly as large as the number of country-pairs that belong to bilateral or regional preferential trade agreements (PTAs). The purpose of this study is to provide...

This paper analyzes the economic effects of content-based import tariffs China imposed on imported auto parts. While China's policy penalized any firm that assembled cars with less than 60 percent Chinese content, the policy was most likely to affect foreign affiliated firms who were more likely...

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...

We study how firms respond to import competition by increasing the speed of trade. We use data on all Portuguese textile and clothing exporters' monthly transactions and exploit the exogenous increase in competition following the removal of Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quotas on Chinese...