Conventional wisdom suggests that when business regulation is excessive, deregulation should enhance efficiency. The liberalization of services markets in Croatia demonstrates that this is not necessarily the case, particularly when features of the reform process allow undue influence by those...

Conventional wisdom suggests that when business regulation is excessive, deregulation should enhance efficiency. The liberalization of services markets in Croatia demonstrates that this is not necessarily the case, particularly when features of the reform process allow undue influence by those...

This study investigates the dynamic effect of economic liberalization, privati‑ zation, and globalization on the export performance of Ethiopian manufacturing firms. We use structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the direct and indirect influences between these macroeconomic reforms and...

Industrial Revolution 4.0, with its emphasis on smart manufacturing, has a profound impact on traditional employment. This study aims to examine changes in firms employment decisions in the context of Industry 4.0, shedding light on the conflict between liberalism's market mechanisms and...

We study the impact of legal restrictions pertaining to pharmacy licences on hospitalizations. We use a reform approved in 2012 in Italy that increased the number of pharmacies allowed to operate in the national territory by 8%. We set up a regression discontinuity design exploiting monthly data...

This paper studies how liberalizing outward foreign direct investments (FDI) affects manufacturers' engagement in global production and their domestic workers' labor market outcomes. Focusing on a liberalization policy in 2001 by the government of Taiwan that allowed 122 electronic products to...

This paper empirically investigates whether FDI liberalization affects productivity dispersion, a potential source of resource misallocation. The identification uses the FDI deregulation policy implemented by the Chinese government in 2002, in which some industries became being foreign...

Explanations for the West's escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors' harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern...

Higher levels of quota granted can induce and increase exports, but the impact is not the same across all tariff lines. Answers are sought to the question of how the level of exports changes as the quota size of tariff rate quotas changes, thus enabling the investigation of whether unilateral...

In July 1991, India began to dismantle its long-standing, highly restrictive import control regime and move toward a more open economy. How were policymakers able to dislodge and replace an entrenched system with powerful vested interests behind it? Standard explanations for policy change -...

The European Union has implemented various trade policies in the textile and clothing sector, a major global employment generator, over the past three decades. This paper investigates how these evolving policies have impacted the four largest exporters of textiles and clothing to the EU. A...

The creation of stable and high-paying jobs by private firms is a first-order issue for Low-and-Medium Income Countries (LMICs). Little is known as to whether trade liberalization helps achieve this goal. In this study, we investigate the impact of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA),...

We examine the effects of international trade in the presence of a set of domestic distortions giving rise to informality, a prevalent phenomenon in developing countries. In our quantitative model, the informal sector arises from burdensome taxes and regulations that are imperfectly enforced by...

A Kuznets-like curve for unemployment suggests that unemployment initially rises with early economic development due to sectoral shifts but decreases as economies mature, diversify, and adapt. This explains how gross national income (GNI) per capita influences or mediates the effect of...

Research about trade liberalization's impact on markups has focused on manufacturing due to data availability considerations. How do these effects vary across sectors? Which industries become more and less competitive as trade barriers are eliminated? We leverage firm-level tax records from the...

This study investigates how credit to firms responds to an energy price shock by comparing the credit growth of similar firms with different energy intensities before and after the shock triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Credit growth of energy-intensive firms declined by 8.75...

This paper examines the impact of imports from developed countries on industry-specific employment in India between 1983 and 2010. The identification strategy relies on comparing differential changes in import exposure across regions to the differential changes in employment within industries....

A major section of the existing literature on strategic trade policy, following a partial equilibrium framework, observed that imposition of tariff by the domestic country leads to a rise in their wage level. Analysis on the impact of strategic trade policy intervention (tariff) on wages and...

The employment share of legal services in the U.S. more than doubled during 1970–1990, in stark contrast to stability during 1850–1970 and after 1990. The relative wage of lawyers and law firm partners also doubled between 1970 and 1990. We argue that this demand shift was driven by...

This paper examines how trade liberalization-induced labor demand shocks affect wages and non-wage working conditions. Using exogenous trade shocks from EU enlargement and worker-level data, we find that export liberalization increases temporary contracts and atypical work schedules,...

How does dismantling deep integration affect international trade? This paper provides new evidence on the consequences of disintegration by estimating the impact of Brexit on goods trade by UK firms. The UK’s exit from the EU’s single market and customs union in January 2021 led to an...

We examine the relationship between economic development and female labor force participation, with a focus on the impact of gender norms. Analyzing quasi-random variation in provincial exports in reunified Vietnam from 2002 to 2018, we find that a positive economic shock led to a significant...

Achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the energy system requires substantial electrification of transportation and many industrial applications, utilizing net-zero generation resources in conjunction with net-zero gas and heat systems. This paper describes and evaluates a centralized...