We propose and apply methods to quantify the impact of national institutions on international trade and development. We are able to identify the direct impact of country-specific institutions on international trade within the structural gravity framework. Our approach naturally addresses the...

This paper is concerned about addressing a question that has become critical in international trade, during the past three decades: "What factors explain the worldwide increase in skill premiums following international trade integration and increasingly globalized economies"? I propose a new...

The welfare implications of trade integration across areas of a country rely on local real wages, typically unmeasured in ex-post analyses and unavailable in counterfactual exercises. I develop and estimate a general equilibrium framework where local labor markets interact via commuting ties and...

We develop a dynamic trade model with spatially distinct labor markets facing varying exposure to international trade. The model captures the role of labor mobility frictions, goods mobility frictions, geographic factors, and input-output linkages in determining equilibrium allocations. We show...

What are the pro-competitive consequences of trade in frictional labor markets? This paper develops and estimates a dynamic general equilibrium trade model to show that the interplay between endogenously variable markups in product markets and frictions in labor markets has important...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

This report critically analyses the paper "A Simple Model of Firm Heterogeneity, International Trade and Wages' authored by, Stephen Ross Yeaple. Yeaple (2005) introduces a static model in which ex-ante homogeneous firms are differentiated based on heterogeneity in technology adoption and skill...

This paper looks inside the firm and investigates how trade alters the matching of worker-specific abilities and task-specific requirements. The outcome of this matching depends on how firms organize their recruitment process and how much they invest into the screening of applicants. In the open...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...