This paper incorporates hierarchical structure into the neoclassical theory of the firm. Firms are hierarchical in two respects: the organization of workers in production and the wage structure. The firm's hierarchy is represented as a sector of a circle, where the radius represents the...

This paper develops a novel, geometric approach to modelling a firm's hierarchical structure. We model the firm''s hierarchy as the sector of a circle, in which the radius represents the height of the hierarchy and the angle of the sector represents the width of the hierarchy. The firm then...

Since Rose’s (2004) striking finding of negligible WTO trade effects, numerous studies have at- tempted to solve the so-called WTO puzzle. These studies adopt novel model specifications to control for potential sources of bias, but often lead to conflicting results. Multilateral...

This paper proposes a within estimator for three-level data, such as time-variant bilateral trade flows. The estimator helps to address the computational difficulties in estimating, for instance, the gravity model of bilateral trade that needs to control for unobserved country-pair and...

Despite recent theoretical literature highlighting the cross effects between preferential trade agreements (PTAs), like the domino effect and the competitive liberalization theory, little has been done to quantify their impact on bilateral trade flows. This paper investigates how preexisting...

This paper empirically examines whether and how similarity in country characteristics affects the changes in trade flows amongst member countries under a preferential trade agreement (PTA). It demonstrates that accounting for similarity in size, income and loca- tion of member countries is...

Conventional estimate of the trade diversion (TD) effect of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) tends to be much smaller than that of the trade creation (TC) effect. This paper ex- amines two sources of estimation bias of the TD effect. The first bias of TD arises from the difficulty in...

The empirical trade literature has long been puzzled by the finding of a large and non-decreasing distance coefficient in the gravity equation amid falling transportation costs over time. To shed new light on this puzzle, the recent theoretical literature shifts its focus to the differential...

There are two main types of data sources of income distributions in China: household survey data and grouped data. Household survey data are typically available for isolated years and individual provinces. In comparison, aggregate or grouped data are typically available more frequently and...

Much of the endogenous growth literature has dwelled on evaluating the spillover effects of trade on growth, but much less efforts have been directed towards tracing and quantifying the spillover effects of foreign investments. This paper, in incorporating the effects of various types of foreign...