Can temporary protection from trade with advanced economies foster the development of 'infant industries' in developing countries? Reka Juhasz considers a natural experiment: Napoleon's wartime blockade of British exports, which allowed protected regions to build capacity in the new technology...

The telegraph was the Victorian equivalent of today's 'big data', helping firms to forecast future demand. Analysing such unique historical 'experiments' helps understand how firms and markets respond when new technology leads to a dramatic change in the availability of information.

The telegraph was the Victorian equivalent of today's 'big data', helping firms to forecast future demand. Analysing such unique historical 'experiments' helps understand how firms and markets respond when new technology leads to a dramatic change in the availability of information.

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winners from growing Chinese demand for commodities. Using census data for...

In a general equilibrium product-cycle model, lower trade barriers in-crease Southern purchasing power, which lifts long-run growth by increasing the profit from innovation. In the short run, factors of production must be reallocated inside firms, which lowers the opportunity cost of innovation,...

Firms face competing needs to expand product variety and reduce production costs. Trade policy affects firm investments in product variety and production processes differently. Access to larger markets enables innovation to reduce costs. Although firm scale increases, foreign competition reduces...

An important element of the cost of distance is time taken in delivering final and intermediategoods. We argue that time costs are qualitatively different from direct monetary costs such asfreight charges. The difference arises because of uncertainty. Unsynchronised deliveries candisrupt...

OECD labor markets have become more "polarized" with employment in the middle of the skill distribution falling relative to the top and (in recent years) also the bottom of the skill distribution. We test the hypothesis of Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) that this is partly due to information...

This paper reviews a new framework for analyzing the interrelationship between inequality, unemployment, labor market frictions, and foreign trade. This framework emphasizes firm heterogeneity and search and matching frictions in labor markets. It implies that the opening of trade may raise...

This paper studies how firm heterogeneity in terms of productivity affects the balance between agglomeration and dispersion forces in the presence of pecuniary externalities through a selection model of monopolistic competition with variable mark-ups. It shows that firm heterogeneity matters....