Productivity growth has flat-lined in most economies despite rapid advances in technology. Economists suggest competing explanations for this paradox. Some argue the current stagnation will persist given deep structural challenges, arguing that recent technological advances are no match for...

Does globalization just create welfare gains, or is it accompanied by lower accountability, reduced welfare provision, labor standards or human rights? We argue that the broad and legally enforceable protection offered to foreign investors by bilateral investment treaties (BITs) worsens the...

Many developing countries are characterized by a large informal sector, and are also often heavily dependent on remittance inflows from abroad. We develop a general equilibrium framework to understand better the dynamic absorption of remittances in a two-sector small open economy, by...

Assessing productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive productivity gains are often attributed to productivity spillovers; however, an alternative, much less emphasized channel is selection and market reallocation...

Raising the productivity content of exports is an important issue for developing and emerging countries. What role do foreign firms play in this process? This question has not been adequately studied. We contribute to the literature by generalizing the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in...

We reevaluate the hypothesis and empirical result that ethnic civil wars lead to higher skilled emigration (Bang and Mitra, 2013). We develop a simple conceptual framework that predicts contrasting results depending upon if the economy is assumed to be agglomerating in skilled labor or...

This paper studies the great collapse in value added trade using a structural decomposition analysis. We show that changes in vertical specialisation accounted for almost half of the great trade collapse, while the previous literature on gross trade has mainly focused on final expenditure,...

Two defining elements of the “global network economy” are the evolution of global flagship networks (GFNs) and the increasing use of digital information systems (DIS) to manage these networks. Both transformations may gradually reduce constraints to cross-border knowledge diffusion, and...