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, both theoretically and empirically, how export intensity (the ratio of exports to sales) is related to firm productivity. Using a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms, we find that Total Factor Productivity (TFP) is strongly negatively correlated with export intensity...

We study how firm and foreign market characteristics affect the geographic distribution of exporter' sales. To this purpose, we use export intensities (the ratio of exports to sales) across destinations as our key measures of firms'relative involvement in heterogeneous foreign markets. In a...

We study, both theoretically and empirically, how trade imbalances affect the structure of countries exports and wage inequality. We show that, in a Heckscher-Ohlin model with a continuum of goods, a Southern (Northern) trade surplus leads to an increase (reduction) in the average skill...

In a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms, we find a robust negative correlation between productivity (however measured) and sales to low-income destinations as a share of total exports. This fact seems at odds with the heterogeneous-firms literature, which predicts...

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,...