Combining macroeconomic and microeconomic data and three indicators of international market integration, this paper assesses the degree to which Latin American labor markets are integrated. The results suggest that relative to East Asia, Latin American labor markets are somewhat more integrated,...

The diffusion of knowledge plays a central role in endogenous growth theories. Simply put, in these models new knowledge can be generated from preexisting knowledge. In other words, existing knowledge is a pure public good, which can benefit any economic agent anywhere. More generally,...

After investment, exports and imports are the most volatile components of aggregate demand within countries. Moreover, the volatility of growth and the volatility of trade flows tend to move together; they declined from the 1990s until 2009, followed by an increase since 2009. This paper...

Using data on net exports and factor endowments for more than 100 countries, this paper studies the relationship between factor endowments and comparative advantage in 28 manufacturing sectors between 1975 and 2010. The authors allow for systematic technological differences across countries,...

This paper investigates differences in the composition of employment between exporting and non-exporting firms. In particular, it asks whether exporting firms hire more engineers relative to blue-collar workers than non-exporting firms. In a stylized partial-equilibrium model, firms produce...

Surveys of export promotion agencies suggest that that they tend to focus on helping firms become exporters as a means to stimulate aggregate export growth. But the existing empirical evidence has paid little attention to the role of export promotion agencies in helping entry into exporting....

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity in Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000–08. The Brazilian experience is instructive, as it is a case of an economy that expanded aggregate exports significantly, but with stagnant aggregate growth in total...

Traditional measures of trade diversification only take into account contemporaneous export baskets. These measures fail to capture a country’s ability to respond to shocks by allocating factors of production into activities for which it has already paid the fixed costs associated with...

This paper assesses the impact of the rise of China on the trade of Latin American and Caribbean economies. The study proposes an index to measure the impact on trade, which suggests sizable effects, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and Paraguay. The paper uses the index...

In the 1990s the mainstream consensus was that trade causes growth. Subsequent research shed doubt on the consensus view, as evidence suggested that the identification of the effect of trade on growth was problematic in the existing literature. This paper contributes to this debate by focusing...