The cultural and geographic proximity between two regions otherwise very distant (both in terms of factor endowment and of specialization pattern) makes the wage perceived as fair in the peripheral region dependent on the wage prevailing in the core region. As a consequence, the peripheral wage...

We argue that, in the presence of asymmetric countries, a trade agreement that conforms to GATT’s reciprocity rule allows the (stronger) less trade dependent country to improve its welfare relative to both the free trade and the trade war. Conversely, the (weaker) more trade dependent country...

We argue that, with an elasticity of substitution in consumption greater than one and higher scale economies in the skill-intensive sectors, the entire volume of world trade matters for wage inequality. This implies that trade integration, even among identical countries, is likely to increase...

We review the micro-level evidence on the effects of trade and investment liberalization in the developing world. The main findings can be summarized as follows. 1) There is evidence of trade-induced productivity gains; 2) These gains mainly stem from the intra-industry real-location of...

We study the effects of trade integration on the regional coevolution of income, migrations and unemployment in a dynamic core-periphery model with limited labor mobility and frictions in the job matching process. Our model can help explain a recently documented empirical puzzle, i.e., the...

We argue that, with an elasticity of substitution in consumption greater than one and higher scale economies in the skill-intensive sectors, the entire volume of world trade matters for wage inequality. This implies that trade integration, even among identical countries, is likely to increase...

We argue that the procompetitive effect of international trade may bring about significant welfare costs that have not been recognized. We formulate a stylized general equilibrium model with a continuum of imperfectly competitive industries to show that, under plausible conditions, a...

We formulate a dynamic core-periphery model with frictions in the job matching process to study the interplay between trade costs, migration and regional unemploymentin the short- and long-run. We find that the spatial distribution of unemployment mirrors (inversely) the distribution of economic...

This paper investigates the relationship between trade openness and the size of government, both theoretically and empirically. We show that openness can increase the size of governments through two channels: (1) a terms of trade externality, whereby trade lowers the domestic cost of taxation...

We show how, in general equilibrium models featuring increasing returns, imperfect competition and endogenous markups, changes in the scale of economic activity affect income distribution across factors. Whenever final goods are gross-substitutes (gross- complements), a scale expansion raises...