Why do we observe some LDCs objecting the prospect of a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), although they have been keen to liberalize investment in preferential agreements in recent years? In this paper, we analyse the issue of MAI implementation and assess the welfare consequences of...

We study the effect “globalization” on wage inequality. Our “global” economy resembles Rosen (1981) “Superstars” economy, where a) innovations in production and communication technologies enable suppliers to reach a larger mass of consumers and to improve the (perceived) quality of...

We introduce incomplete outsourcing contracts in an otherwise standard model of MNEs based on the trade-off between proximity and concentration. This has both positive and normative implications. As to the former, incomplete outsourcing contracts can account for the observed emergence of FDIs in...

Recent evidence shows that the “home bias puzzle” in international trade may be associated with the mere presence of national borders (McCallum (1996)). In this paper we provide a theoretical framework to explain why borders may matter so much for trade. Our argument is that even between...

This paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics of nonmanual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides o¤setting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

This paper provides a cross-country perspective to the firm-level analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and labour demand. We estimate labour demand equations in eleven European countries using dynamic panel data techniques on samples that permit to distinguish the ownership status...

The spatial structure of transport networks is subject to increasing returns in transportation, distance, and density economies. Transport costs between locations are thus, in general, endogenous, and are determined by the interaction between the spatial distribution of transport demand and...

In this paper, we quantitatively characterize the mechanism of collaborative knowledge creation at the individual researcher level a la Berliant and Fujita(2008) by using Japanese patent data. The key driver for developing new ideas is found to be the exchange of differentiated knowledge among...

This study shows evidence for collaborative knowledge creation among individual researchers through direct exchanges of their mutual differentiated knowledge. Using patent application data from Japan, the collaborative output is evaluated according to the quality and novelty of the developed...