This paper develops a game to study the possibility of co-operative behaviour in a situation where the political system is dominated by two strong, opportunistic parties competing in an economy highly dependent on the export of a commodity. Since a binding agreement as an external solution is...

South-South trade agreements are proliferating: Developing countries signed 70 new agreements between 1990 and 2003. Yet the impact of these agreements is largely unknown, as existing North- North and North-South micro-level studies are likely to yield misleading predictions for South-South...

The lively media debate on the employment consequences of offshoring is not yet backed by an adequate empirical evidence around its actual effects. This paper relies on sectoral data to assess the impact of material offshoring on employment in the Italian manufacturing industries; with just one...

Recent literature stresses the importance of low productivity as a barrier to the international expansion of firms. But financial frictions or adverse employment conditions at home could matter as well. In this paper, we present new empirical evidence on the importance of these factors. We use a...

We propose and solve a simple model of firm-level decisions to offshore production stages of lower skill intensity than that of activities that remain in the domestic location. In theory, offshoring is optimal only for the more productive among heterogeneous firms if it entails a fixed cost. In...

We analyze empirically the impact of urban agglomeration on Italian wages. Using microdata from the Bank of Italy\'s Survey of Household Income and Wealth for the years 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2002 on more than 22,000 employees distributed in 242 randomly drawn local labor markets, we test whether...

We examine the determinants of multinational firms’ location choices in Europe by estimating a nested logit model on a data-set of 5,761 foreign subsidiaries established in 55 regions in 8 EU countries over the period 1991-1999. We find that firms perceive regions across different countries as...

The Most-Favored Nation (MFN) clause has long been suspected of creating a free rider problem in multilateral trade negotiations. To address this issue, we model multilateral negotiations as a mechanism design problem with voluntary participation. We show that an optimal mechanism induces only...

The presence of foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) can benefit local economies. In particular, if MNEs are very productive compared to domestic firms, they may promote learning and catch-up of local firms. Such a channel of spillovers from MNEs to local firms is known as the Veblen-...