This dissertation studies the roles of comparative advantage, monopolistic competition, and firm-level heterogeneity in international trade.The first essay investigates cross-country and cross-industry variation in the fractions of exporters among domestic firms. The paper presents a model of an...

An increasing number of regional trade agreements (RTAs) include “labor clauses” that require or urge the signatory countries to commit to maintaining a certain level of labor standards. This paper, starting by classifying more than 200 currently effective RTAs depending on the nature and...

his paper attempts to perform an empirical analysis of the effects of “labor clauses” provided in bilateral or plurilateral trade agreements (or regional trade agreements: RTAs) on working conditions that laborers in the RTA signatory countries actually face, using macro-level data for a...

This paper proposes an alternative test of the monopolistic competition model of international trade that has an implication for the relationship between the volume of trade and similarity among trading countries in the size of the economy. In the existing literature the model’s implication...