This paper identifies critical modeling choices, as well as differences in the driving forces behind offshoring, that may explain differences in results. Offshoring of industry-specific tasks has wage and employment effects that are vastly different from those identified in Grossman &...

Inertia in academia sometimes obstructs the development of important insights. That is one reason for the specially long gap separating Coase's seminal paper [1937] that laid the foundations of current Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the efforts of scholars to develop his ideas. But as TCE...

Transaction Costs Theory has been considered the 'new orthodoxy' in the theory of the firm, being this the very same reason for wide criticism by different schools of economic thought. However, there seems to be signs of complementarity between TCT and evolutionary approaches to the firm. Some...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to flexibly infer border barriers are often missing for services, we derive a novel methodology for projecting output data. The empirical...

Changes in the costs of trading inputs or final goods affect establishment-level job flows. Using a longitudinal database containing the universe of manufacturing establishments in California from 1992 to 2004, we find that a decline in input or final-good trade costs is associated with job...

We build a model of tacit collusion between firms that operate in multiple markets to study the effects of trade costs. A key feature of the model is that cartel discipline is endogenous. Thus, markets that appear segmented are strategically linked via the incentive compatibility constraint....

In a two-country international trade model with oligopolistic competition, we study the conditions on market structure and trade costs under which a merger policy designed to benefit domestic consumers is too tough or too lenient from the viewpoint of the foreign country. Calibrating the model...

When the world economy was recently hit by a severe recession, governments all over the world reacted by initiating stimulus packages. Some countries (among them, most notably, China and the US) tried to put special emphasis on their home industries by including “Buy local” clauses into the...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...

This paper quantifies the effect of the government-controlled appreciation of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) vis-à-vis the USD from 2005 to 2008 on the prices charged by US producers. As the RMB during that time was pegged to a basket of currencies, the empirical strategy must account for the fact...