This paper develops a framework to study the interplay between world trade and interest rates. The model incorporates an explicit notion of time and of production length, along the lines of the 'Austrian' tradition of Böhm-Bawerk (1889). Changes in the interest rate affect production lengths,...

This chapter was prepared for the Handbook of International Economics (Vol. 5) edited by Gita Gopinath, Elhanan Helpman, and Kenneth Rogoff. We provide a review of the recent literature —both theoretical and empirical — analyzing the multi-dimensional connections between globalization and...

What insights can be gained from bringing the theory of the firm to the global economy? I discuss several new features of the world economy that can be explained by incorporating the theory of the firm into the theory of international trade. Among the new features I discuss are the move to...

This paper studies the role of reduced barriers to international trade from two dimensions: (i) the implementation of Free Trade Agreements and (ii) declining "border effects". Our empirical estimates suggest that diminished border effects accounts for the bulk of the increase in international...

This policy note summarises the main findings of our recent research on the effects of labour and corporate taxation on international trade, and discusses their policy implications. The first major finding is that labour taxes do not seem to affect imports, while their effect on exports is...

We use Spanish firm-level data to test the hold-up model of global sourcing proposed by Antr s & Helpman (2004). We propose a novel representation of the model which guides us in bringing the theory to the data. We estimate a discrete choice model of firms' sourcing behavior, separately for the...

We consider two channels via which foreign inputs into industrial production may lead to productivity effects. The first one concerns dynamic externalities between firms which share technical and organizational knowledge which is vital for the productivity growth of a particular industry. We...

In this paper, we incorporate offshoring of labor-intensive goods in a model with multi-product firms, and explore its implications in partial and general oligopolistic equilibrium. We identify important aspects of this phenomenon and argue that improvements in offshoring opportunities can...

International operating firms often follow complex market supply strategies, ranging from Exports and Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) to regional Export Hubs. Explaining the driving forces behind multinational setups and their influence on the agglomeration-core pattern has become an emerging...

This paper provides the first evidence about pure exporters (i.e., firms exporting all of their output to the foreign market) -- a phenomenon overlooked and cannot be explained in the existing literature. It then offers a generalized model of Melitz (2003) for examining the existence and...