This article suggests that international trade, even between identical countries, can raise the relative demand for skilled labour. It shows that a simple generalisation of <link rid="b37">Krugman's (1979)</link> model of trade in differentiated products has implications for the skill premium, through economies of...

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...

In this paper we analyse the dynamics of trade patterns in the six largest industrialised countries and in eight fast growing Asian economies. For each of these countries we study the shape of the sectoral distribution of an index of trade specialisation and its evolution over time. Our analysis...

Under plausible assumptions about preferences and technology, the model in this paper suggests that the entire volume of world trade matters for wage inequality. Therefore, trade integration, even among identical countries, is likely to increase the skill premium. Further, we argue that...

A by now large literature in regional economics has greatly improved our understanding of the determinants of the observed spatial disparities in productivity. However, this literature neglects what seems to be a robust and persistent fact accompanying regional productivity differences: high...

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...

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...

Markups vary widely across industries and countries, their heterogeneity has increased overtime and asymmetric exposure to international trade seems partly responsible for this phenomenon. In this paper, we study how the entire distribution of markups affects resource misallocation and welfare...

We review the micro-level evidence on the effects of trade and investment liberalization in the developing world. The basic findings are the following. There is evidence of trade-induced productivity gains. These gains mainly stem from output share reallocations among firms with different...

This paper investigates the relationship between trade openness and the size of governments, both theoretically and empirically. We argue 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,...