This paper identifies the most restrictive limit that rules of origin can enforce and still continue to guarantee gains from trade area formation in general settings. Many commonly used rules of origin exceed this condition in practise. Second, free trade areas generally involve unharmonized...

The number of preferential trade agreements has greatly increased over the past two decades, yet most existing bilateral arrangements take the form of free trade areas, and less than ten percent can be considered to be fully fledged customs unions. This paper develops a political economy model...

This paper examines the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, we extend the `protection for sale\' model to allow for di®erent...

We use a multi-country asymmetric oligopolistic framework for segmented markets to study the welfare effects of reducing tariff discriminations - which we call a move towards Most Favored Nation tariffs. Both unilateral and multilateral reforms are considered. We investigate this issue under...

In this paper, we investigate the fiscal impact of immigration on the UK economy, with a focus on the period since 1995. We provide estimates for the overall immigrant population for the period between 1995 and 2012, and for more recent immigrants who arrived since 2000, distinguishing between...

This paper provides the first direct evidence on the determinants of link formation among immigrants in the host society. We use a purposely-designed survey on a representative sample of Sri Lankan immigrants living in Milan to study how migrants form social links among them and the extent to...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...

This paper analyzes the effects of parental migration on children left behind in order to understand whether and how the effects of migration on children depend on which of their parents migrates. I describe the migration of one of the spouses as a sequential game in which the spouse who...

This paper explores the role of information transmission in explaining donors\' choice between project aid and budget support. Budget support increases the involvement of recipient governments in the decision-making process and can thus be an example of a “delegation-scheme\". Conversely,...

e investigate the role of constituents’ preferences in shaping the voting behavior of elected representatives on immigration and trade policy. Using a novel dataset spanning the period 1986-2004, in which we match individual opinion surveys with congressmen roll call votes, we find that...