Regional free trade zones have been unexpectedly successful in the last decade. Since 1980 the European Community enlarged significantly its membership and its scope. It now includes southern European countries, and market-integrating features allowing goods, people, services and capital to flow...

New empirical and theoretical work has highlighted the importance of multi-product firms in international tradeflows. We examine multi-product exporters in the small open economy of Belgium, considering their importance and the relationship between the margins of trade and firm productivity,...

New empirical and theoretical work has highlighted the importance of multi-product firms in international trade flows. We examine multi-product exporters in the small open economy of Belgium, considering their importance and the relationship between the margins of trade and firm productivity,...

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different products than manufacturing exporters. In particular, high market-specific fixed...

This paper examine multi-product exporters in Belgium, considering their importance and the relationship between the margins of trade and firm productivity. We employ proxies for trade costs to quantify the extensive and intensive margin adjustments of trade. Relatively few exporting firms...

New empirical and theoretical work has highlighted the importance of multi-product firms in international tradeflows. We examine multi-product exporters in the small open economy of Belgium, considering their importance and the relationship between the margins of trade and firm productivity,...

Large multi-product firms dominate international trade flows. This paper documents new facts about multi-product manufacturing exporters that are not easily reconciled with existing multi-product models. Using novel linked production and export data at the firm-product level, we find that the...

Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

This paper explores the dynamic relationships between foreign direct investment (FDI), international trade, and economic development. First, emphasizing the pivotal role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) - particularly in the context of Global Value Chains (GVCs) - it underscores how FDI and...