This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect firm employment in China using a unique county level minimum wage data set matched to disaggregated firm survey data. We investigate both the effect of imposing a minimum wage, and the effect of the policies that tightened enforcement in 2004....

This paper documents the evolution of the international relationships of individual U.S. states along three dimensions: trade, migration, and finance. We examine how specialized or diversified state economies differ in terms of the products they export and with whom they trade, the origins of...

I quantitatively examine the effects of location-and sector-specific productivity growth on structural change across countries from 1970-2011. The results shed new light on the “hump shape" in industry's share in GDP across levels of development. There are two key features. First, otherwise...

This paper assesses the quantitative importance of including sectoral heterogeneity in computing the gains from trade. Our framework draws from Caliendo and Parro (2015) and Alvarez and Lucas (2007) and has sectoral heterogeneity along five dimensions, including the elasticity of trade to trade...

Economic research into the causes of business cycles in small open economies is almost always undertaken using a partial equilibrium model. This approach is characterized by two key assumptions. The first is that the world interest rate is unaffected by economic developments in the small open...

We investigate whether the classic Mundell-Flemming "trilemma" has morphed into a "dilemma" due to financial globalisation. According to the dilemma hypothesis, global financial cycles determine domestic financial conditions regardless of an economy's exchange rate regime and monetary policy...

I study optimal interest rate policy in a small open economy with consumer search in the product market. When there are search frictions, firms price-to-market, with implications for the design of monetary policy. Country-specific shocks generate deviations from the law of one price for traded...

This technical note is developed as a companion to the paper ‘Assessing Bayesian Model Comparison in Small Samples’ (Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute working paper no. 189). Taking the workhorse open-economy model of Martínez-García and Wynne (2010) with nominal rigidities under...

I quantify the welfare effects of replacing the US capital income tax with higher labor income taxes under international financial integration using a two-country, heterogeneous-agent incomplete markets model calibrated to represent the US and the rest of the world. Short-run and long-run factor...

What drives US current account imbalances? Is there solid evidence that the behavior of the current account is different during deficits and surpluses or that the size of the imbalance matters? Is there a threshold relationship between the US current account and its main drivers? We estimate a...