This paper explores the link between trade and European labour markets by using evidence on relative commodity prices and intra-sectoral skill levels at the NACE three-digit level for the four large EC countries and for the period 1976–90. We find that if the relative import prices of...

This paper argues that economic structure is a robust determinant of the OECD business cycle. Countries that share similar manufacturing sectors are shown to display more synchronized business cycles. Interestingly, the well-established rule of trade impacting on rich countries' business cycles...

The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth....

The recent extensive study of vertical product differentiation models has allowed for the analysis of international trade issues in the presence of country asymmetries in terms of product qualities, technology, costs, market size, and income. In the presence of such asymmetries, national...

We consider a small, unionized economy which interacts with an economically larger one, and we study the growth implications of different institutional structures for the labour markets. We study three possible scenarios. Under decentralized bargaining in the large economy, the two countries...

We develop a model where trade liberalization leads to skill-biased technological change, which in turn raises the relative return to skilled labour. As firms get access to a larger market, they have incentives to choose a more skill-intensive technology because a lowering of variable costs...

The recent extensive study of vertical product differentiation models has allowed for the analysis of international trade issues in the presence of country asymmetries in terms of product qualities, technology, costs, market size and income. In the presence of such asymmetries, national...

This paper is concerned with the fact that the incidence of speculative attacks tend to be temporally correlated; that is, currency crises appear to pass ‘contagiously’ from one country to another. The paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature, and analyses the contagious nature of...

We formulate a simple model that captures two recent hypotheses: (i) that countries with an abundant absolute endowment of skilled labour will be net exporters in R&D-intensive industries; and (ii) that countries with a large domestic market will be net exporters in scale-intensive industries....

A country’s suitability for entry into a currency union depends on a number of economic conditions. These include, inter alia, the intensity or trade with other potential members of the currency union, and the extent to which domestic business cycles are correlated with those of the other...