Many development policies, such as placement of infrastructure or local economic development schemes, are “place-based.” Such policies are generally intended to stimulate private sector investment and economic growth in the treated place, and as such they are difficult to appraise and...

Adapting our earlier model of multinationals, we address policy issues involving wages and labor skills. Multinational firms may arise endogenously, exporting their firm-specific knowledge capital to foreign production facilities, and geographically fragmenting production into skilled and...

A monopolistically competitive manufacturing sector produces goods used for final consumption and as intermediates. Intermediate usage creates cost and demand linkages between firms and a tendency for manufacturing agglomeration. How does globalization affect the location of manufacturing and...

A model is constructed in which multinational firms may arise endogenously. Multinationals exist in equilibrium when transport and tariff costs are high, incomes are high, and firm-level scale economies are important relative to plant-level scale economies. Less obvious, multinationals are more...

Classic trade questions are reconsidered by generalizing a factor-proportions model to multiple countries, multi-stage production, and country-specific trade costs. We derive patterns of production specialization and trade for a matrix of countries that differ in relative endowments (columns)...

This paper is an effort to do international trade theory without mentioning countries. Nearly all models of the international economy assume that trade takes place between nations or regions which are themselves dimensionless points. We develop a model in which economic space is instead assumed...

We consider a trade model combining a 2x2x2 Heckscher-Ohlin structure, monopolistic competition, transport costs, and multinational corporations. We demonstrate how the mix of national and multinational firms that operate in equilibrium depends on technology and on the division of the world...

This paper investigates the determinants of countries' export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries' exports into the contribution from increases in external demand and from improved...

Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on engineering details of the production process with two extremes being 'snakes' and 'spiders'. Snakes are...

This paper contributes to research endogenizing multinational firms in general-equilibrium trade models. We attempt to integrate separate contributions on horizontal multinationals which produce the same final product in multiple locations, with work on vertical multinationals, which...