This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature – the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review...

This paper investigates the determinants of countries’ export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries’ exports into the contribution from increases in external demand and from...

This paper proposes a new empirical framework for analyzing specialization dynamics. A country’s pattern of specialization is viewed as a distribution across sectors, and statistical techniques for analyzing the evolution of this entire distribution are employed. The empirical framework is...

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on heterogeneous firms and trade, whichemphasizes firm selection into international markets and reallocations of resources acrossfirms. We discuss the empirical challenges that motivated this research and its relationship totraditional trade...

This paper reviews the new economic geography literature, which accounts for the uneven distribution of economic activity across space in terms of a combination of love of variety preferences, increasing returns to scale and transport costs. After outlining the canonical core and periphery...

Firms' decisions about which goods to produce are often made at a more disaggregate level than the data observed by empirical researchers. When products differ according to production technique or the way in which they enter demand, this data aggregation problem introduces a bias into standard...

Theory suggests that market forces should bring the relative pay of skilled workers into line in different regions within a country. Andrew Bernard, Stephen Redding, Peter Schott and Helen Simpson show that this is not the case for the UK and argue that regional industrial policy needs to take...

This paper exploits the division of Germany after the Second World War and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 as a natural experiment to provide evidence of the importance of market access for economic development. In line with a standard new economic geography model, we find...

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region- industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

This paper presents new evidence on urbanization using sub-county data for the United States from 1880-2000 and municipality data for Brazil from 1970-2000. We show that the two central stylized features of population growth for cities – Gibrat’s Law and a stable population distribution -...