New Economic Geography (NEG) models are difficult to confront with the data, since "on the one hand, they generally emphasise the unleashing of agglomeration forces after trade liberalisation, but on the other hand, they also accomodate multiple equilibria and non-monotonicity" (Brülhart,...

The main feature of the italian trade pattern is the polarization of revealed comparative advantage in the traditional labor intensive sectors. This seems at odds with the fact that Italy is a high-income industrial country. In this paper, we argue that this peculiar trade structure can be...

The cultural and geographic proximity between two regions otherwise very distant (both in terms of factor endowment and specialization pattern) makes the wage perceived as fair in the peripheral region dependent on the wage prevailing in the core region. As a consequence, the peripheral wage is...

In this paper we analyse the dynamics of trade patterns in the six largest industrialised countries and in eight fast growing Asian economies. For each of these countries we study the shape of the sectoral distribution of an index of trade specialisation and its evolution over time. Our analysis...

This paper investigates the relationship between trade openness and the size of governments, both theoretically and empirically. We argue that openness can increase the size of governments through two channels: (1) a terms of trade externality, whereby trade lowers the domestic cost of taxation,...

We investigate competitive, selection and reallocation effects in monopolistic competition trade models. We argue that departing from CES preferences in an otherwise standard Dixit-Stiglitz setup with additive preferences seems to involve implausible assumptions about consumer behavior and...

We argue that the large and growing North-South trade imbalances arisen over the last three decades may have exacerbated wage inequality worldwide. In particular, we show that in a standard Heckscher-Ohlin setup with a continuum of goods, a Southern trade surplus is associated with higher skill...

We study the effect of trade integration on the regional coevolution of income, migrations, and unemployment in a dynamic coreperiphery model with limited labor mobility and frictions in the job matching process. Our model can help explain a recently documented empirical puzzle, i.e., the...

The cultural and geographic proximity between two regions otherwise very distant (both in terms of factor endowment and of specialization pattern) makes the wage perceived as fair in the peripheral region dependent on the wage prevailing in the core region. As a consequence, the peripheral wage...