We depart from the trade and wages literature and its emphasis on North-South trade, examining North-North trade and linkages between trade-based integration and relative wages in an Etiher-type division of labor model. Using this model we identify a formal relationship between international...

We examine the political economy underpinnings of import protection in general equilibrium. Starting from a dual theoretical representation of production, trade, and consumption, we map a general representation of the real economy to underlying political processes - aka the political support...

We show that the standard concertina result for tariff reforms -- i.e. lowering the highest tariff increases welfare -- no longer holds in general if we allow for international capital mobility. The result can break down if the good whose tariff is lowered is not capital intensive. If the...

Reducing tariffs and increasing consumption taxes is a standard IMF advice to countries that want to open up their economy without hurting government finances. Indeed, theoretical analysis of such a tariff-tax reform shows an unambiguous increase in welfare and government revenues. The present...

This paper formulates a structural empirical model of heterogeneous firms whose workers exhibit fair-wage preferences. In the underlying theoretical framework, such preferences lead to a link between a firm's operating profits on the one hand and wages of workers employed by this firm on the...