This paper provides a critical look at recent empirical work in international trade theory. The paper addresses the issue of why empirical work in international trade has perhaps not been as influential as it could have been. The paper also provides several suggestions on directions for future...

In this paper we develop some simple models of optimal tax and tariff policy in the presence of global corporations that operate in an imperfectly competitive environment. The models emphasize two important differences in the practical application of tax and tariff policy - tax, but not tariff,...

This paper takes a novel approach to trying to disentangle the impact of globalization on wages by focusing on changes in the return to speaking English, the international language of commerce, in South Africa as that country re-integrated with the global economy after 1993. The paper finds that...

In this paper, we test some propositions about international trade flows that are derived from a model of monopolistic competition developed by Elhanan Helpman. We investigate whether the volume of trade between OECD countries is consistent with the predictions of a modal in which all trade is...

It has long been believed that international competition forces domestic firms to behave more competitively. I term this the imports-as--market-discipline hypothesis. I construct a simple static oligopoly model and estimate the model using panel data from Turkish manufacturing firms. The data...

This paper evaluates how much of the economics profession has evaluated the evidence on the relationship between international trade and economic growth. The paper highlights the basic approaches to the trade and growth question that the literature has adopted. The case is made that more...

We define aggregate productivity growth as the change in aggregate final demand minus the change in the aggregate cost of primary inputs. We show how to aggregate plant-level data to this measure and how to use plant-level data to decompose our measure into technical efficiency and reallocation...

Analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is important and, unfortunately, an ever more pressing need. If policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely impacted, then policymakers need to identify those who have been most harmed and the magnitude of that harm....

We introduce a new method for conditioning out serially correlated unobserved shocks to the production technology by building ideas first developed in Olley and Pakes (1996). Olley and Pakes show how to use investment to control for correlation between input levels and the unobserved...

Many recent papers have estimated components of the disturbance term in the "market model" of equity returns. In particular, several studies of regulatory changes and other policy events have decomposed the event effects in order to allow for heterogeneity across firms. In this paper we...