Why do we observe some LDCs objecting the prospect of a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), although they have been keen to liberalize investment in preferential agreements in recent years? In this paper, we analyse the issue of MAI implementation and assess the welfare consequences of...

We study the effect “globalization” on wage inequality. Our “global” economy resembles Rosen (1981) “Superstars” economy, where a) innovations in production and communication technologies enable suppliers to reach a larger mass of consumers and to improve the (perceived) quality of...

We introduce incomplete outsourcing contracts in an otherwise standard model of MNEs based on the trade-off between proximity and concentration. This has both positive and normative implications. As to the former, incomplete outsourcing contracts can account for the observed emergence of FDIs in...

Recent evidence shows that the “home bias puzzle” in international trade may be associated with the mere presence of national borders (McCallum (1996)). In this paper we provide a theoretical framework to explain why borders may matter so much for trade. Our argument is that even between...

This paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics of nonmanual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides o¤setting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

This paper provides a cross-country perspective to the firm-level analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and labour demand. We estimate labour demand equations in eleven European countries using dynamic panel data techniques on samples that permit to distinguish the ownership status...

In this paper, we propose a statistical index of industrial localization based on Kullback-Leibler divergence. This index is particularly well suited to cases where industrial data is only available at the regional level. Unlike existing regional-level indices, our index can be employed to test...

In this paper, based on the recent advances in the new economic geography (e.g., Fujita et al. [12]), we analyze impacts of transport costs on the spatial patterns of economic agglomeration. We first identify prototypes from the existing models, and explain the mechanism of how transport costs...