Economists are skeptical about the economic benefits of hosting "mega-events" such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup, since such activities have considerable cost and seem to yield few tangible benefits. These doubts are rarely shared by policy-makers and the population, who are typically...

The rising importance of multinationals in the world economy has been accompanied by a rise in trade between affiliates of multinationals located in different countries, and by profits being shifted to low tax countries. The effect of trade barriers on taxation, intra firm trade and profit...

We work with a panel of bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002, exploring the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. We are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where...

This Paper provides a summary of what is known about trends in international commodity market integration during the second half of the second millennium. The range of goods that have been traded between continents since the Voyages of Discovery has steadily increased over time, and there has...

This Paper builds a multi-country, multi-sector general equilibrium model that explains the decision of heterogeneous firms to serve foreign markets either through exports or local subsidiary sales (FDI). These modes of market access involve different relative costs, some of which are sunk while...

The paper provides a comparative history of the economic impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. By focussing on the relative price evidence, it is possible to show that the conflict had major economic effects around the world. Britain's control of the seas meant that it was much less...

Globalization is not only about the rise of trade, FDI, and migration. It is also about the changing linkages among these flows. The main findings of this Paper can be summarized as follows. First, at least in the 1990s, import trade liberalization fostered not only trade but also inward...

Several recent papers have argued that trade and financial development may be linked, either for political economy reasons, or because foreign competition and exposure to shocks lead to changes in the demand for external finance. In this paper we use the cross-country and time-series variation...

In this Paper, we show that with international externalities, different country sizes, imperfect competition and trade costs, tax competition for mobile firms is efficiency enhancing with respect to the free market outcome. Nonetheless, while the latter entails too many firms in the larger...

We generalize the Antràs and Helpman (2004) model of the international organization of production in order to accommodate varying degrees of contractual frictions. In particular, we allow the degree of contractibility to vary across inputs and countries. A continuum of firms with heterogeneous...