This paper examines the impact of institutions on a multinational firm's ownership strategy. We develop an international joint venture (IJV) model in which a multinational firm and its local partner both can undertake costly ex post actions to increase their revenue share specified by the ex...

In this paper, we make use of a unique world electronics production data set to assess China's upgrading trajectory in the global electronics industry. Contrary to existing studies, we find no evidence that China's electronics production activities are more sophisticated than one would expect...

In many globalized industries, vertical outsourcing seems to co-evolve with horizontal integration in the component sector. In order to account for this phenomenon, I incorporate modularity into an industry-equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and perfect contracts that allows the...

In this paper we argue that export data are an inadequate tool to measure a country's international competitiveness when external trade is dominated by export-processing trade. Export data do not necessarily reflect the value produced in an exporting country, but rather capture the gross value...

Previous studies have argued that global value chains (GVCs) have increased the sensitivity of trade to external business cycle shocks. This may occur either because GVC trade is concentrated in durable goods industries, which are known to have high income elasticities (a composition effect), or...

This paper analyzes to what extent East Asia¡¯s integration into global value chains (GVCs) has made the region more vulnerable to business cycle shocks in the West. We identify different channels through which business cycle shocks in the West can propagate to East Asian countries via global...

AIDS morbidity and mortality are expected to have a large impact on households’ labor supply in rural Malawi since they reduce the time that adults can spend on production for subsistence and on income generating activities. However, the data demands for estimating this impact are high,...

The growth of East Asia’s intra-regional trade is driven largely by increased component trade within global electronics production networks. Data on both electronics trade and production elucidate a pattern of specialization in which upper- and middle-income countries produce...

China has become the center of virtually any discussion about globalization and its impact on the Canadian economy. According to a recent opinion poll by the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada (APFC), Canadians believe that China is the second most important country/region for Canada's prosperity...

This paper unveils a systematic pattern in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) processing trade. In a cross-section of the PRC’s provinces, the average distance traveled by processing imports (import distance) is negatively correlated with the average distance traveled by...