This paper analyses incomes and socioeconomic status of internal migrants over time and in comparison to their new neighbors and investigates whether status consumption is a way for newly arrived city dwellers to signal their social standing. Using a novel dataset from the emerging economy of...

Several post-Soviet states have introduced policies to improve the relative economic, political or social position of formerly disadvantaged populations. Using one example of such policies - "Kazakhisation" in Kazakhstan - we investigate their impact on the comparative earnings of two directly...

Research for evidence on offshoring activities and its driving forces has been done by analyzing gross trade flows related to offshoring using gravity equations augmented by ad hoc measures of supply-side country differences. We develop a specification grounded in incomplete specialization that...

We suggest that bilateral gravity equations augmented by ad hoc measures of absolute supply-side country differences are misspecified. Building on Haveman and Hummels (2004), we develop and test an alternative specification rooted in incomplete specialization that views bilateral gravity...

We propose a novel way to measure the rule of law intensity of exports at the goods level based on nearly 100 million disaggregated bilateral trade flows around the globe. We categorise goods into three groups: fragmented, primary and other. The theoretical literature on holdup problems...

The gravity literature has focused on distance, borders and contiguity to measure geography's impact on trade. We add value to this literature in terms of data, method and assessment of effects. First, we expand existing geographical databases by adding topographical features. We supply novel...

The paper extends the literature on the political economy of labor market institutions by developing a framework in which owners of capital can benefit from both greater labor market flexibility and better rule of law. Their choice of location of manufacturing centres can, therefore, by...

We present a novel two-stage gravity specification with period-varying bilateral trade cost terms. We test our specification to confirm the benchmark result on declining international distance elasticities over time, using two new data sets. Analyzing period-varying bilateral trade cost derived...