variable returns to scale in production and patterns of specialization this paper discusses some trade and welfare implications of the two sector model based on increasing returns to scale irs in one industry and decreasing returns to scale drs in the other it has been shown by horst herberg and murray kemp that given homothetic production functions with irs in one industry and drs in the other the production possibilities frontier ppf is strictly concave to the origin near the irs axis and strictly convex to the origin near the drs axis while this result constitutes an important finding and is contrary to the general impression among economists even twelve years after the publication of herberg and kemp s paper no attempt has been made to analyze its implications for welfare and patterns of specialization in this paper i consider a simple twocommodity model with irs in one industry and drs in the other and discuss some interesting implications of variable returns to scale vrs first i demonstrate that in this model if a small open economy specializes completely in production it will do so in the drs commodity and not in the irs commodity as is generally believed second if at a given price ratio an internal production equilibrium exists a welfaremaximizing small open economy will never specialize completely in production even though the ppf exhibits decreasing opportunity costs over a part of its range third given output generated economies and diseconomies of scale welfare maximization for a small country requires a permanent tax subsidy scheme encouraging expansion of the irs industry and contraction of the drs industry finally in a two country model with identical tastes and technology across the countries free trade equilibrium may result in incomplete specialization by the exporter of the irs commodity and complete specialization by the exporter of the drs commodity in the course of the analysis i argue that tinbergen s formulation of frank graham s case for protecting the irs industry is incorrect i then present a possible reformulation of it in section i the basic production model is introduced in section ii the model is analyzed and in section iii it is argued that all the results continue to hold in the multifactor case

trade migration and integration evidence and policy implications this paper takes as its point of departure the unique position recently adopted by swedish policymakers emphasizing migration as a tool to increase trade we attempt to empirically scrutinize this

information advantage in cournot oligopoly abstract consider an oligopolistic industry where firms have access to the same technology but are asymmetrically informed about the environment even though it is commonplace to think that in this context superior information leads to higher profits we find that under cournot competition this is not generally the case it holds when firms technology exhibits constant returns to scale but it does not necessarily hold otherwise journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d43 l13

disentangling the migration trade nexus the pro trade effects of immigrants and emigrants in the presence of vertical and horizontal product differentiation this paper presents an exploration of the migration trade nexus taking the case of italy by crossing the two dimensions of migration immigration and emigration and the two dimensions of intra ind

the export effect of immigration into the usa much has been written on the connection between migration and international trade human history provides important examples of migrations leading to increased trade activity with perhaps the most well known example of the overseas chinese this study investigates the trade related importance of chinese and other immigrants into the usa previous studies may have underestimated or overestimated the relationship between trade and migration with nations treated as featureless plains rather than as varied landscapes this study contends that an understanding of the immigration trade relationship can be improved upon by examining the specific pattern and destination of immigration into specific us states using state level export data to 28 immigrant source countries in 1993 a strong immigration trade link is found reinforcing conclusions made by previous research using country level data the compelling connection between immigration and trade found in this study and others suggests that future change

agricultural dis incentives and food security is there a link using the world bank database distortions to agricultural incentives this paper analyzes the impact that agricultural dis incentives have on food security for a wide sample of countries over the 1990 2010 period we adopt a continuous treatment approach applying generalized propensity score matching to reduce potential biases stemming from differences in observed country characteristics the results provide strong evidence of self selection and heterogeneous food security impacts at different levels of policy intensity estimates of the dose response functions show that both discrimination against agriculture and large support for it lead to poor performance in the availability access and utilization dimensions of food security

equilibrium price dispersion with sequential search abstract the paper studies equilibrium pricing in a product market for an indivisible good where buyers search for sellers buyers search sequentially for sellers but do not meet every seller with the same probability specifically a fraction of the buyers meetings lead to one particular large seller while the remaining meetings lead to one of a continuum of small sellers in this environment the small sellers would like to set a price that makes the buyers indifferent between purchasing the good and searching for another seller the large seller would like to price the small sellers out of the market by posting a price that is low enough to induce buyers not to purchase from the small sellers these incentives give rise to a game of cat and mouse whose only equilibrium involves mixed strategies for both the large and the small sellers the fact that the small sellers play mixed strategies implies that there is price dispersion the fact that the large seller plays mixed strategies implies that prices and allocations vary over time we show that the fraction of the gains from trade accruing to the buyers is positive and nonmonotonic in the degree of market power of the large seller as long as the large seller has some positive but incomplete market power the fraction of the gains from trade accruing to the buyers depends in a natural way on the extent of search frictions

the impact of common native language and immigration on imports this paper sheds light on the impact of common native language and immigration both jointly and separately on imports common native language and immigrant networks stimulate bilateral trade relationships by reducing transaction costs through both market creation and the removal of information asymmetries whereas evidence on the importance of weak links for trade provides support for the first channel the need for additional immigrants does not decline if the second mechanism proves to be a driver of trade relationships for estimation of a causal and nonlinear effect of the two common native language and immigration on imports we employ a flexible identification strategy which allows common native language and migration to be endogenous the results suggest that both common native language and immigration raise imports but the impact of common native language is ever increasing with its level whereas that of immigration is of declining importance as its level increases

immigrant trade links transplanted home bias and network effects macro level data for the us and 73 trading partners spanning the years 1980 to 2001 is used with a gravity specification to investigate the influence of immigration on bilateral trade prior research has identified immigrant stocks as a significant determinant of trade however this study indicates that the us immigrant trade link is driven by immigration from relatively low income countries a 10 increase in the immigrant stock is found to generate respectively 4 7 and 1 5 increases in domestic imports from and exports to the typical low income home country the observed link is decomposed into two hypothesized channels network effects and transplanted home bias considerable variation in per immigrant trade effects is found across home countries imports from the typical low income home country are estimated to increase by up to 2057 due to transplanted home bias and by as much as 2967 as a result of network effects while exports rise by up to 910 as a result of networks

immigrant specificity and the relationship between trade and immigration theory and evidence studies routinely document that immigrant employment concentrates in non traded goods sectors and that many immigrants have low inter sectoral mobility we consider these observed characteristics of immigrant employment with regard to the question of how immigration affects a nation s pattern of production and trade we model an economy producing three goods one is non traded domestic labor and capital are domestically mobile but internationally immobile allowing that some new immigrants will become specific to the non traded goods sector the model indicates that the effects of immigration on output and trade depend importantly on the sectoral pattern of employment of both new and existing immigrants empirical investigation in a panel data set of oecd countries supports the model s prediction that immigration raises the output of non traded goods consistent with the model we also find that immigration and trade are complements given its empirical support the model s implications for immigration policy are then discussed

do state borders matter for u s intranational trade the role of history and internal migration empirical evidence of the impact of borders on international trade flows using the gravity equation approach abounds this paper examines the empirical relevance of state borders in u s interstate trade for various specifications of the gravity equation we find a large and economically significant subnational border effect for some specifications however two model specifications drastically reduce if not eliminate the border effect i dynamic panel specifications controlling for past levels of trade and ii models conditioning on internal migration les resultats empiriques de l analyse des impacts des frontieres sur les flux de commerce international en utilisant les modeles de gravite sont devenus monnaie courante ce texte examine l impact des frontieres entre etats a l aide de cette technique il s avere que les effets de frontieres infranationales sont grands et significatifs pour certaines specifications du modele cependant deux specifications du modele reduisent dramatiquement s ils n eliminent pas l effet de frontiere i des specifications qui prennent en compte les niveaux anterieurs de commerce et ii des specifications qui dependent de la migration interne

transitions from home to marriage of young americans the paper examines the impact of income on the transitions between home living independently and first marriage of young americans a matching model is outlined similar to that used in theories of job search to explain the probability of marriage and living alone a multiple state multiple transition model which allows for correlated heterogeneity on the first and subsequent transitions is estimated the results show that income has a strong and significant effect the impact of unobserved heterogeneity is examined in detail the impact of the young person s earnings on the transitions is explored through simulation

search theoretic models of the labor market a survey we survey the literature on search theoretic models of the labor market we show how this approach addresses many issues including the following why do workers sometimes choose to remain unemployed what determines the lengths of employment and unemployment spells how can there simultaneously exist unemployed workers and unfilled vacancies what determines aggregate unemployment and vacancies how can homogeneous workers earn different wages what are the tradeoffs firms face from different wages how do wages and turnover interact what determines efficient turnover we discuss various modeling choices concerning wage determination and the meeting process including recent models of directed search

revisiting the trade migration nexus evidence from new oecd data international migrants contribute to bilateral trade creation if their presence reduces information costs or entails additional demand for goods from their source countries using new data on stocks of foreign born individuals by skill class we try to separately quantify those two channels we assume that improved information affects host countries imports and exports symmetrically while the preference channel matters for imports only on average for differentiated goods both channels contribute evenly toward the total trade creating effect of migration in line with expectations the relative importance of the trade cost channel is largest for homogeneous goods and for high skilled migrants

search at wholesale auto auctions wholesale trade in used cars is conducted by ascending bid auctions with sale subject to the seller s acceptance of the winning bid one out of three times the seller rejects the bid and no trade takes place i model the seller s decision as the outcome of search and thus determined by the winning bid distribution and a reported retail price this market is ideal for testing search theory since all offers whether or not accepted are observed qualitative predictions of the theory in particular the role of the variance are confirmed the quantitative results are more ambiguous

migration and trade theoretical and empirical research in economics suggests that bilateral migration triggers bilateral trade through a number of channels this paper assesses the functional form of the impact of migration on trade flows in a quasi experimental setting we provide evidence that the relationship is not log linear in particular at small levels of immigration stocks the elasticity of trade to migration is quite high and it declines to zero at about 4 000 immigrants if immigration stocks exceed such a level the evidence suggests that trade will not increase anymore this suggests that for cross country network and other effects flowing from immigration to materialise at a significant level for trade a high enough level of immigrant stocks is necessary but there appears to be satiation as immigrant numbers increase

institutional quality and the effectiveness of aid for trade abstracttrade policy barriers and high transaction costs hinder developing countries from taking the full advantages of the global trading system in order to help developing countries overcome the

increasing returns migrations and convergence abstract the paper investigates the link between convergence and factor mobility it contrasts the predictions of exogenous growth models where factor mobility is found to promote convergence with endogenous growth models where factor mobility invariably leads to a cumulative process of regional divergence the paper develops a simple model of regional growth with mobile factors increasing returns to scale and diminishing returns to the reproducible factor it also tries to provide more solid microfoundations to the specification of the migration choice because of diminishing returns to the reproducible factor the economy will not be able to generate endogenous self sustaining growth nevertheless the results suggest that even in the context of an exogenous growth model convergence is not warranted however convergence may occur for some particular constellations despite the presence of increasing returns to scale more precisely it is shown that convergence is more likely the greater is the scope for scale economies and somewhat paradoxically the lower is the degree of labor mobility

immigration and trade creation econometric evidence from canada immigrants may expand trade with their country of origin owing to superior knowledge of or preferential access to market opportunities the authors test this proposition using canadian trade data with 136 partners from 1980 to 1992 in an augmented gravity equation they find that a 10 percent increase in immigrants is associated with a 1 percent increase in canadian exports to the immigrant s home country and a 3 percent increase in imports they also find that among the primary categories of immigrants independents have the greater influence on trade immigration via the entrepreneur class appears to have less impact on trade than all other classes except refugees

out of sight not out of mind education networks and international trade summary university students typically develop between them long lasting ties of friendship and trust as well as an attachment to their university if they are foreign students they also form a bond to their country of study this paper investigates the impact of university ties on the uk s trade with 167 countries during 1999 2009 i find robust evidence that education network ties boost the uk s bilateral trade flows specifically the impact of networks is stronger on trade between the united kingdom and countries with dissimilar institutions and culture and particularly with post communist economies results are robust to different econometric specifications and regressors

the impact of social structure on economic outcomes s ocial structure especially in the form of social networks affects economic outcomes for three main reasons first social networks affect the flow and the quality of information much information is subtle nuanced and difficult to verify so actors do not believe impersonal sources and instead rely on people they know second social networks are an important source of reward and punishment since these are often magnified in their impact when coming from others personally known third trust by which i mean the confidence that others will do the right thing despite a clear balance of incentives to the contrary emerges if it does in the context of a social network economists have recently devoted considerable attention to the impact of social structure and networks on the economy for example see the economists chapters in rauch and casella 2001 and the illuminating review essay of this volume by zuckerman 2003 as well as dutta and jackson 2003 and calvoarmengol 2004 however i focus here on sociologists contributions sociologists have developed core principles about the interactions of social structure information ability to punish or reward and trust that frequently recur in their analyses of political economic and other institutions i begin by reviewing some of these principles building on these i then discuss how social structures and social networks can affect economic outcomes like hiring price productivity and innovation

optimal timing of decisions a general theory based on continuation values abstract by extending a methodology dating back to jovanovic 1982 we develop a comprehensive theory of optimal timing of decisions based on continuation value functions and operators that act on them rewards can be bounded or unbounded one advantage of this approach over standard bellman methods is that continuation value functions are smoother than value functions another is that for a range of problems the continuation value function exists in a lower dimensional space than the value function we exploit these advantages to obtain a range of new results on optimality optimal behavior and efficient computation

industrial groupings and foreign direct investment we explore worldwide foreign direct investment location decisions by japanese manufacturing firms from 1985 through 1991 our conditional logit estimates provide evidence that firms location decisions are affected by membership in either vertical or horizontal keiretsu consistent with previous studies that stress agglomeration effects on firms location decisions we find that the stock of investment in a region by a firm s vertical keiretsu partners increases the probability of location further we find that the recent flow of investment into a region by a firm s horizontal keiretsu partners increases the probability of investment to the region providing evidence of networking effects

an econometric analysis of reservation wages this paper describes an analysis of survey data on unemployed people who reported their asking wage and the wage they expected to earn we show that if agents behavior is described by the standard optimal job search model one can use these data to deduce structural parameters rather than estimate them and we report our deductions from two surveys 1 of british unemployed people

diverging patterns with endogenous labor migration abstract the standard neoclassical model cannot explain persistent migration flows and lack of cross country convergence when capital and labor are mobile here we present a model where both phenomena may take place assuming increasing returns and perfect capital mobility the driving forces behind labor migration are the size and the composition of the workforce the size of the workforce produces divergence a larger workforce in one country implies higher wages the wage gap induces in migration and this makes the wage gap even larger in this case migration is only beneficial for the labor importing country the evolution in the composition of the workforce due to migration may have opposite effects in one case in migration keeps the wage of skilled workers high enough to induce people to qualify for skilled jobs this improves the composition of labor in the receiving country only and it makes divergence a likely outcome in another case labor migration keeps the relative wage of unskilled workers in the rich country high enough to induce all migrants to take unskilled jobs and reduce the skilled to unskilled ratio in that country then migration is beneficial to the country which was first exporting labor

finite duration of unemployment insurance reservation wages and participation in the job market abstract this paper extends the theoretical analysis of the effects of unemployment insurance on the decisions of unemployed workers regarding employment and participation in the labour market it uses a job search model that considers jobs with uncertain duration and unemployment benefits that are paid only during a finite number of periods after becoming unemployed separating the incentive and disincentive effects of unemployment insurance the analysis permits us to study the impacts of several changes in the scheme of unemployment insurance on the reservation wages of unemployed workers and on their decisions relative to participation in the job market

the determinants of cross border equity flows abstract we explore a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross border equity flows between 14 countries 1989 1996 we show that a gravity model explains international transactions in financial assets at least as well as goods trade transactions gross transaction flows depend on market size in source and destination country as well as trading costs in which both information and the transaction technology play a role distance proxies some information costs and other variables explicitly represent information transmission an information asymmetry between domestic and foreign investors and the efficiency of transactions the geography of information is the main determinant of the pattern of international transactions while there is weak support in our data for the diversification motive once we control for the informational friction we broaden the scope of our results by presenting some evidence linking the results on equity transactions to equity holdings

job search stigma effect and escape rate from unemployment this article formulates job search models incorporating certain types of the stigma effect of unemployment it is assumed that the probability of getting a job offer given the unemployment individual contacts the firm is influenced by the duration of unemployment and is justified in a signaling context the optimal search is analyzed for one sector as well as across several independent labor market segments it is shown that there are reasonably general conditions on the search environments for which both the individual reservation wage and escape rate are negative duration dependent a fact observed in empirical studies

the causal impact of migration on us trade evidence from political refugees immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs using geographical variation across u s states for the period 2008 to 2013 i estimate the respective causal impact of immigrants on u s exports and imports

a theoretical explanation of some stylized facts of economic growth this paper presents a three good two country general equilibrium model that is consistent with several stylized facts of economic growth the three goods are manufactures agriculture and services manufactures are subject to economies of scale the model predicts that services a nontraded good must be more expensive in the country with higher per capita income it also shows that as per capita income increases we should expect the productivity in commodities relative to services to rise the model is able to generate many other stylized facts of economic growth

increasing returns urban unemployment and international capital mobility a trade policy analysis abstract this paper compares the effects of tariffs quotas and ver both with and without international capital mobility for a small open economy facing urban unemployment of unskilled labor and external increasing returns in the manufacturing sector expressions for the shadow price of foreign exchange and capital are derived under each type of trade restriction it is shown that international capital mobility in such an economy unambiguously lowers the welfare cost of all forms of trade restriction in contrast to the existing literature on full employment crs economy where international capital mobility unambiguously raises the welfare cost of tariff protection

job separation in a non stationary search model a structural estimation to evaluate alternative unemployment insurance systems this paper considers a job search model in which the environment is not constant throughout the unemployment spell and where jobs do not last for ever in this situation reservation wages can be lower than they would be in a model without consideration of such separations but they can initially be higher precisely because of the non constant environment the model is estimated structurally by using spanish data for the period 1985 1996 the main finding is that after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity the unemployment hazard rate is almost flat during the first six months however after this duration the highly decreasing job offer arrival rate comes to be the only significant factor given that acceptance probabilities become equal to one the estimated parameters are used to evaluate different unemployment insurance designs we conclude that a non monotonic pattern in unemployment benefits joint with a tax paid by workers and based on unemployment duration makes this duration 13 2 lower than it currently is in spain copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

bridging trade theory and labour econometrics the effects of international migration this paper surveys current theoretical and empirical research on international migration with a particular emphasis on the links between trade theory and labour empirics

trade factor prices and the gains from trade with increasing returns to scale existing analyses seem to suggest that national increasing returns to scale are not a very useful tool for analysing trade owing to problems such as multiple equilibria and the tendency towards complete specialization the purpose of this paper is to construct a model in which there are in fact determinant relationships among country size the direction of trade the gains from trade and international factor price differences in the model differences in country size determine the direction of trade which in turn determines factor price differences and limits the possible distribution of the gains from trade commerce international prix des facteurs de production et les gains de l change dans un contexte de rendements croissants a l echelle les analyses conventionnelles semblent suggerer que les rendements croissants h l 6chelle au niveau national ne constituent pas une avenue prometteuse dans l analyse du commerce international parce que de tels rendements creent une presomption en faveur de la specialisation complete et conduisent a des situations d 6quilibres multiples le but de ce m6moire est de construire un mod le dans lequel il existe des rapports determinants entre la dimension du pays la direction des 6changes les gains de l echange et les differentiels internationaux entre les prix des facteurs de production dans ce mod le les differences entre les pays en termes de dimension d6terminent la direction du commerce international laquelle d6termine le differentiel entre les prix des facteurs de production et limite l eventail des r6partitions possibles des gains de l echange

immigrant links to the home country empirical implications for u s bilateral trade flows immigrants ties to their home countries can play a key role in fostering bilateral trade linkages immigrant ties include knowledge of home country markets language preferences and business contacts that have the potential to decrease trading transaction costs empirical results for the united states suggest that immigrant links have historically been important in increasing bilateral trade flows with immigrants home countries copyright 1994 by mit press

the effects of foreign acquisition on domestic and export markets dynamics in china using recent data from the chinese manufacturing industry and the generalised propensity score this paper establishes economically significant causal effects of foreign acquisition on domestic and export markets dynamics

trade diaspora and migration to new zealand this paper examines the hypotheses that a greater stock of migrants in new zealand from a particular country leads to more trade between that country and new zealand and a greater stock of new zealanders living overseas in a particular country leads to more trade between that country and new zealand it also examines the relationships between migration diaspora and tourism exports the literature suggests that migrants can stimulate trade by lowering transaction costs and by bringing with them preferences for goods produced in their home country our approach is to apply panel data techniques within the framework of a standard gravity model of trade to a dataset consisting of information on 233 countries in each of the 26 years between 1981 and 2006 we estimate a random effects panel sample selection model using correlated random effects our results indicate that migration does indeed stimulate trade in our benchmark specification merchandise exports from and imports to new zealand both have a statistically significant relationship with numbers of migrants in new zealand imports also have a statistically significant relationship with numbers of new zealanders overseas our results also suggest that migration stimulates imports more than exports

factor intensities and factor substitution in general equilibrium abstract this article examines how factor intensity rankings between industries and the economy wide asymmetry in the degree of factor substitution combine to influence the manner in which changes in relative commodity prices affect the factoral distribution of income the reciprocal influence of factor endowment changes on the composition of outputs is also discussed the analysis is undertaken in a general three factor two commodity framework the minimal sized model that allows both influences to affect factor prices and admits of the possibility of complementarity between factors factors which are good substitutes find their returns behave somewhat similarly when commodity prices change while factors which are complements experience strongly asymmetrical fortunes a crucial role is played by a comparison of the share of the middle factor in each sector

inflation tax rules and investment some econometric evidence this paper presents econometric evidence on the effect of tax incentives on business investment in the united states in the period from 1953 through1978 the analysis emphasizes that the interaction of inflation and existing tax rules has contributed substantially to the decline of business investment since the late 1960 s because the investment process is far too complex for any simple econometric model to be convincing i have estimated three quite different models of investment behavior the strength of the empirical evidence rests on the fact that all three specifications support the same conclusion more generally the analysis and evidence show that theoretical models of macroeconomic equilibrium should specify explicitly the role of distortionary taxes especially taxes on capital income the failure to include such tax rules can have dramatic and misleading effects on the qualitative as well as the quantitative properties of macroeconomic theories this paper was presented as the fisher shultz lecture at the fourth world congress of the econometric society 29 august 1980 in aix en province this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

uncertainty and the dynamics of r d uncertainty varies strongly over time rising by 50 to 100 in recessions and by up to 200 after major economic and political shocks this paper shows that higher uncertainty reduces the responsiveness of r d to changes in business conditions a caution effect making it more persistent over time thus uncertainty will play a critical role in shaping the dynamics of r d through the business cycle and its response to technology policy i also show that if firms are increasing their level of r d then the effect of uncertainty will be negative while if firms are reducing r d then the effect of uncertainty will be positive

learning about the arrival of sales abstract we analyse optimal stopping when the economic environment changes because of learning a primary application is optimal selling of an asset when demand is uncertain the seller learns about the arrival rate of buyers as time passes without a sale the seller becomes more pessimistic about the arrival rate when the arrival of buyers is not observed the rate at which the seller revises her beliefs is affected by the price she sets learning leads to a higher posted price by the seller when the seller does observe the arrival of buyers she sets an even higher price

declining reservation wages and learning empirical studies of job search strongly suggest that the reservation wages of unemployed job seeking individuals decline with the length of their respective unemployment spells previous explanations of this behaviour based on age effects liquidity constraints and limited unemployment benefits are not adequate we provide a new answer to this question based on the reasonable assumption that workers do not have precise knowledge of the distribution of the prevailing wages an individual model of job search and learning is formulated it is shown that the declining trend of reservation wages naturally arises due to the selection process when search costs are not too small the example of a normal wage offer distribution is analysed and the implications are discussed

immigration and firms integration in international production networks abstract this paper uses panel data on cross border migration and transaction level trade for swiss municipalities to identify the effect of migration networks on specific margins of the integration of firms in global value chains we find that the stability of an international supplier buyer relationship is strongly associated with a priori knowledge about the supplier s origin as measured by the migrant network with the same country of origin present in the buyer s immediate environment here a municipality not only do firms engage in more stable input trading relationships and intensify relationships in terms of input trading volume but they reduce the total number of suppliers in a given country in response to an increase of immigration from there these results are in line with a theoretical framework where firms sourcing strategies are subject to incomplete information firms diversify their foreign supplier network in order to be less susceptible to potential bad shocks once informational barriers are lifted firms contract fewer suppliers but purchase a larger volume from each of them

the trade creating effects of business and social networks evidence from france using theory grounded estimations of trade flow equations this paper investigates the role that business and social networks play in shaping trade between french regions the bilateral intensity of networks is quantified using the financial structure and location of french firms and bilateral stocks of migrants compared to a situation without networks migrants are shown to double bilateral trade flows while networks of firms multiply trade flows by as much as four in some specifications finally taking network effects into account divides the estimation of the impact of transport costs and of the effect of administrative borders by around three

benefits of a slanted view a discussion of disclosure bias abstract fischer and verrecchia j account econom 2004 forthcoming studies a model of imperfect competition in which firms disclosures are affected by biased information processing they find that optimism can add punch to a firm s actions when facing an optimist a rival is forced to soften its competitive posture thereby rendering such biases viable although the setting provides a cogent explanation for disclosure bias its reliance on imperfect information processing introduces some questions one concern is the ease with which polar results can be obtained when the rules of the game are sufficiently relaxed the discussion provides examples illustrating this and related issues

constrained by hours and restricted in wages the quality of matches in the labor market this paper examines the explicit loss born by workers who face constraints in their working hours by analyzing differences in actual and desired hours and wages men tend to be underemployed while women are evenly split between over and underemployment losses in surplus are generally small but 10 of underemployed men and women experience losses of more than 34 or 50 of surplus respectively the loss measure is also an important determinant in predicting labor market transitions meaning increases in surplus losses generate a higher probability of changing from workers present jobs or changing the number of hours jel j22 j41

group learning wage dispersion and non stationary offers can differences in equilibrium beliefs among otherwise identical individuals account for a substantial degree of wage inequality this paper shows that this is possible if two conditions are met first people learn about the distribution of wage offers from the experience of their peers and second people believe that wage offers are stationary even though offers that arrive later tend to have higher wages than offers that arrive earlier peer groups can then end up with different stable beliefs that lead to intergroup wage differences the non stationarity of offers is rationalized in a model where firms can either advertise their job openings or not and where advertised ones have more influence on more inexperienced job searchers a statistic is proposed whose application to existing studies suggests that the non stationarity considered here is present in data

shirking or stochastic productivity in major league baseball reply firms produce in an uncertain environment the long literature on the theory of the firm under uncertainty has focused on demand uncertainty 4 18 14 the unanimity question 8 15 or technological uncertainty 23 1 7 regarding the latter an interesting question is how that randomness enters the technology one source might be purely unpredictable factors such as the weather or accidents agricultural output for instance is dependent not only on the quantity of inputs hired but on the amount of rainfall natural disasters and the like a different source of technical uncertainty is variations in the quality and reliability of the input services hired in professional sports for example the performance of an athlete varies from game to game and season to season the reliability of capital a crucial issue in nuclear power generation is another example reflecting the stochastic nature of input productivity one economic consequence of this randomness of productivity is that an employer cannot know a priori the input s value but rather must form an estimate of its expected marginal contribution spence 20 showed how an employer uses signals such as educational attainment to determine if a worker is worth hiring once hired the firm still faces the difficulty of determining if a below average realization of productivity resulted from shirking by the employee or a bad draw from his productivity distribution this agency problem outlined in detail by alchain and demsetz 1 and holmstrom 10 has important implications to our perception of work effort especially in the presence of long term labor contracts allegations of shirking due to long term job security have been associated with seniority rights professional athletes and in the academic institution of tenure

isolating the network effect of immigrants on trade within the migration trade nexus literature this paper proposes a more carefully defined measure of migration business networks and quantifies its impact on bilateral trade using cross sectional data and controlling for the overall bilateral stock of migrants the share of migrants employed in managerial business related occupations has a strong additional effect on trade those immigrants should be the ones directly involved in the diffusion and transmission of information relevant for companies trading with other countries their presence is found to increase the volume of trade especially of imports beyond the already known effect of immigrants or highly educated immigrants when we control for the presence of highly educated immigrants the share of immigrants in business network occupations shows a particularly large effect on trade in differentiated goods we also find that highly educated individuals in business related occupations are those contributing to stimulate import and export by the largest margin business network effects seem particularly important in stimulating exports to culturally different countries such as those with different language and legal origin

scale economies wage differentials and north south trade abstract this paper attempts to isolate the effect of external economies of scale in production on the pattern of north south trade the results show that when the relative wage is higher in the north and only the north innovates the south produces and exports those goods with the lowest economies of scale while the remaining set of goods is produced and exported by the north production subsidies offered by the south raise southern income and welfare but if the north introduces a new set of goods the benefits of the subsidies to the south dissolve

ethnic networks and trade intensive versus extensive margins abstract ethnic networks have been associated with increased international trade although studies have not differentiated between entry into foreign markets and trade expansion we find that ethnic networks increase trade on the intensive margin but not on the extensive margin

factor movements and commodity trade as complements abstract several models are presented in which factor mobility leads to an increase in the volume of world trade the models share the common characteristic that the basis for trade is something other than differences in relative factor endowments these alternative bases for trade include returns to scale imperfect competition production and factor taxes and differences in production technology taken together the models suggest a more general idea the widely held notion that trade in goods and factors are substitutes is in fact a rather special result which is a general characteristic only of factor proportions models

trade expansion and contract enforcement consider a world of traders separated in geographic economic or social space honest trade offers larger gains for more distant traders but frequencies of meetings and information flows about cheating have local bias honesty is self enforcing only between pairs of sufficiently close neighbors global honesty prevails only in a sufficiently small world the extent of self enforcing honesty is likely to decrease when the world expands beyond this size costly external enforcement is useful only if the world is sufficiently large and its net payoff need not be larger than that of a self governing small community intermediate size worlds fare worst

the strategic choice of managerial incentives do firms with separate owners and managers maximize profits we address this question for an oligopoly where managers compete in quantities or prices as in the cournot or bertrand models and owners choose their managers incentives we find that there is a strategic aspect in the problem of selecting incentives and that profit maximizing behavior does not result in particular in the oligopoly we study the behavior of firms competing in quantity price more closely resembles perfectly competitive collusive behavior than cournot bertrand behavior

anonymous market and group ties in international trade abstract history provides many examples of cohesive groups dispersed over several countries who exploit the ties between their members to gain entry into foreign markets the phenomenon is well established empirically and noteworthy because it suggests the importance of informational barriers in international transactions we present a simple model where output is produced through a joint venture and agents have complete information domestically but are unable to judge the quality of their match abroad a minority of individuals otherwise identical to all others can exploit complete information in international matches between group members if they so choose group ties increase aggregate trade and income but hurt the anonymous market because they deprive it disproportionately of the group s more productive members

overconfidence insurance and paternalism it is well known that when agents are fully rational compulsory public insurance may make all agents better off in the rothschild and stiglitz 1976 model of insurance markets we find that when sufficiently many agents underestimate their personal risks compulsory insurance makes low risk agents worse off hence behavioral biases may weaken some of the well established rationales for government intervention based on asymmetric information

increasing returns dynamic stability and international trade abstract a simple two country two good model in which economies of scale form the basis of international trade is presented it is shown that the larger country exports the good characterized by increasing returns and imports the good subject to constant returns a key feature of the paper is a comprehensive stability analysis it turns out that a normal output price response is necessary for d stability furthermore the marshall lerner condition must be satisfied in terms of the short run import demand elasticities for local dynamic stability finally if international factor mobility is permitted cross hauling of specific factors may be observed

deleveraging crises and deep recessions a behavioural approach macroeconomic dynamics are characterized by alternating patterns of periods of relative stability and large swings standard micro founded macro economic models account for these patterns through exogenous and persistent shocks in this paper we develop a fully decentralized and micro founded macro economic agent based model augmented with an opinion model which produces endogenous waves of pessimism and optimism that feed back into firms leverage and households precautionary saving behaviour a major emergent property of our model is precisely the complex successions of stable and unstable macro economic regimes the model is further able to account for a wide spectrum of macro and micro empirical regularities within this framework we analyse a series of macro economic phenomena of key relevance in the current macro economic debate especially the occurrence of deleveraging crises and fisherian debt deflation recessions our analysis suggests that the relative dynamics of prices and wages and the resulting income distribution along a deflation ary path are critical determinants of the severity of the recession and the chances of recovery

factor mobility trade and welfare abstract the paper develops a north south model which is driven by scale economies in the modern sector the model predicts that skilled and unskilled labor migrate from south to north and capital migrates from north to south migration of skilled labor and capital exhibits complementarity with trade while migration of labor may exhibit complementarity or substitutability if the terms of trade effects are ignored small movements of all factors affect the welfare of the population in south negatively and of that in north positively the effects of migration on the terms of trade are ambiguous in general

cultural distance and the us immigrant trade link using data from the world and the european values surveys we calculate cultural distances between the us and 54 immigrant home countries and examine the influences of cultural distance and immigrant populations on us imports from and exports to immigrants home countries during the years 1997 2004 our study indicates that for both us imports and exports the trade enhancing effect of immigrants partially offsets the trade inhibiting effect of cultural distance further decomposing our measure of cultural distance into two component dimensions and revisiting the immigrant trade relationship we find significant variation in the extent to which immigrants counter the trade inhibiting influences of the underlying dimensions of culture for both us imports and exports our findings have the implication that by countering the trade inhibiting influences of cultural differences between their home and host countries immigrants exert pro development effects

real time search in the laboratory and the market the standard model of labor market search posits repeated infinite horizon search from a fixed distribution of wages in a stationary environment under these circumstances the optimal search policy has a reservation wage property i e the decision to accept an offer involves a comparison of the offer with a time invariant constant w which itself is a function of the parameters characterizing the search environment a wage offer greater than or equal to w is accepted while any other is rejected and search is continued some early empirical job search studies however accumulated evidence of a declining trend in reservation wages over the course of an unemployment spell 1 since then several theoretical explanations for the declining reservation wage profiles have emerged all of which relax the stationarity assumption of the standard model for example reuben gronau 1971 assumes searchers have finite lives kenneth burdett 1977 gerard j van den berg 1990 james albrecht and susan vroman 2005 and others model short term unemployment benefits albrecht pieter a gautier and vroman 2006 permit directed search to heterogeneous prospects 2 john p danforth 1979 and silvio rendon 2006 consider general liquidity con strained search and burdett and tara vishwanath 1988 model learning about the job offer distribution behavioral explanations for declining reservation wages have been suggested by braunstein and schotter 1981 schotter and braunstein 1982 and others in this paper we present the results of the first ever to our knowledge real time search laboratory experiment performed in an effort to investigate this falling res ervation wage phenomenon where field studies of unemployed search often rely on strong identifying assumptions to recover searchers unobservable reservation wages in the laboratory we are able to elicit subjects complete reservation wage profiles in an incentive compatible manner 3 further in the laboratory we are able to

do high skill immigrants trigger high quality trade this paper investigates the links between product quality and the pro trade effect of ethnic networks using a large panel on bilateral stocks of immigrants with information for 19 oecd destination countries and 177 origin countries in line with the approach of rauch and trindade we classify traded goods according to their quality level and separately estimate pro trade elasticity of ethnic networks for each subgroup we allow for heterogeneity of immigrants according to both the level of per capita income of their country of origin and their education level our findings suggest that the trend of the pro trade effect of immigrants over quality seems to be driven by the north south specialisation across varieties for both supply and demand indeed ethnic networks mostly facilitate imports of those varieties for which their countries of origin have a comparative advantage as for exports ethnic networks are more effective in promoting exports to their homeland of those varieties for which there is relatively higher demand we show that the same trend applies to products characterised by the same degree of differentiation according to the classification proposed by rauch and given their lower liquidity constraints and advantages in human capital we find a greater impact of high skilled migrants consistent across all quality levels

are international trade and factor mobility substitutes abstract this paper analyzes whether factor flows and commodity trade are substitutes or complements i e whether increasing the level of one impacts adversely or favorably on the volume of the other it derives with the aid of a new general equilibrium framework of the world which allows possible differences in factor endowments tastes and technologies across the two trading countries the necessary and sufficient condition for substitutability and complementarity the results are then further examined in two special cases a survey of different concepts of substitutability and complementarity which have appeared in the literature is also given

arm s length relationships we show that lowering the cost of acquisition of information that a principal obtains about the performance of an agent may make it more difficult for the principal to commit to threats hence it will weaken incentives and can therefore be counterproductive this phenomenon is explored in a framework where improving the quality of information makes a commitment not to renegotiate less credible applications to the theory of the firm are briefly explored

new developments in trade theory and ldcs abstract this paper surveys the new literature on international trade relevant to the north south controversy in the first part two types of north south models are considered the unequal exchange theory of lewis and emmanuel and the models of dynamic interaction of findlay taylor and others the analysis focuses on the determinants of growth the terms of trade and relative employment in the world economy in the second part the paper reviews the empirical literature on south north and south south trade and the theories of north south technological gaps intra industry trade and external economies finally we analyze the literature on exports and economic growth and the neo classical keynesian and disequilibrium approaches to the theory of import controls

reconciling the pattern of trade with the pattern of migration aspects of the brain drain are considered in a theoretical context the emphasis is on the migration of those with managerial skills between countries with abundant skilled labor and those with abundant unskilled labor the results indicate that countries with abundant skilled labor therefore export managers e g through multinational subsidiaries and skilled labor intensive goods yet import skilled employees the brain drain excerpt

an equilibrium theory of learning search and wages we propose an equilibrium theory of learning from search in the labor market which addresses the search behavior of workers the creation of jobs and the determination of wages as functions of labor market histories in the model each worker has incomplete information about his job finding ability and learns about it from his search outcomes the theory formalizes a notion akin to discouragement over each uninterrupted unemployment spell unemployed workers update their beliefs about their job finding abilities downward and reduce their desired wages one contribution of the paper is to integrate learning from search into an equilibrium framework by inducing endogenous heterogeneity in workers beliefs learning from search provides a novel explanation for a set of related empirical observations about the labor market including unemployment duration dependence and wage dispersion another contribution is to apply lattice theoretic techniques to analyze learning from experience which is useful because learning generates convex value functions and in principle multiple solutions to a worker s optimization problem

inventory holding as a strategic weapon to deter entry recent papers by dixit 1980 and eaton and lipsey 1981 have explored the strategic use of committed product specific capital by an incumbent firm in order to influence a post entry equilibrium and in some cases make entry unattractive by committing or sinking part of the production costs prior to entry the incumbent creates a credible shift in its own reaction function if entry should occur in this way the payoffs in the post entry equilibrium can be influenced to the incumbent s advantage the entry game thus consists of two stages the first in which the incumbent is able to strategically commit itself prior to entry and the second or post entry period in which a duopoly equilibrium is realized the more costs that are put up front by the incumbent the greater is the post entry output it will wish to sell for a given output of the entrant and the lower will be the resulting equilibrium price if the set up or fixed costs of entry are sufficiently high entry may be rendered unprofitable this paper extends the idea in a natural way all the production costs of a quantity of output can be sunk or committed by stockpiling inventory of the product the stock of inventory held by the incumbent firm represents a credible shift in its reaction function in response to entry in the following way the inventory is a stock that can be sold off over time in a way consistent with intertemporal profit maximization constrained by the presence of the entrant moreover the threat to sell off the inventory in response to entry is credible since given that entry has occurred the opportunity cost of the inventory is zero it seems reasonable to require that any strategic asymmetry between incumbent and entrant should be restricted to commitments made by the former prior to entry conditional on such commitments the post entry game should give neither firm a strategic advantage this requirement is the same as the game theoretic concept of perfectness 1 entry can be credibly deterred because the entrant knows that were entry to take place it would be in the incumbent s own interest to follow the anticipated sales programme of inventory in order to demonstrate that entry may be deterred by holding a stock of inventory that is sufficiently large that deterrence can be made the perfect equilibrium of the complete entry game the properties of the equilibrium with entry must be derived the post entry equilibrium is modelled here as a pair of nash strategies in sales programmes if the sales programme anticipated by the entrant in the post entry equilibrium implies a negative present value entry will be deterred thus successful entry deterrence implies that the equilibrium with entry is never realized the incumbent can then continue to receive monopoly profits less the holding cost of the inventory which serves as a credible deterrent to entry but is never sold

do foreign workers reduce trade barriers microeconomic evidence this paper provides evidence that foreign workers reduce firms trade costs and thus increase the probability that firms export this informs both the literature on trade costs and the microeconomic literature on firms export behaviour we identify the nationality of each worker in a large sample of german establishments and relate this to the exporting behaviour of these establishments we allow for the possible endogeneity of an establishment s workforce by instrumenting the share of foreign workers with the regional distribution of foreign workers in the wider labour market we find a significant effect of worker nationality on exporting which is not driven by the industrial occupational or locational concentration of migrants the effect is much stronger for senior occupations who are more likely to have a role in exporting decisions by the establishment the relationship is also stronger when we consider exports to particular regions and workers from these regions consistent with a gravity model in which trade flows from country i to j are a function of migrants from j in i

trade accumulation and uneven development abstract this paper develops a two country model of capital accumulation and growth where the industrial sector exhibits increasing returns to scale it shows that uneven development is a necessary outcome in such a model an initial discrepancy in capital labor ratios between the two countries will cumulate over time leading to the division of the world into a capital rich industrial region and capital poor agricultural region which region takes on which role depends on primative accumulation that is on which region starts with more capital if capital is mobile internationally the model can given rise to a two stage pattern of development a first stage where trade is the engine of growth in the leading country and a second in which foreign investment takes on that role which is reminiscent of the hobson lenin theory of imperialism

rybczynski s theorem in the heckscher ohlin world anything goes abstract we demonstrate that rybczynski s classic comparative statics can be reversed in a heckscher ohlin world when preferences in each country favor the exported commodity this taste bias has empirical support an increase in the endowment of a factor of production can lead to an absolute curtailment in the production of the commodity using that factor intensively and an absolute expansion of the commodity using relatively little of the same factor this outcome which we call reverse rybczynski implies immiserizing factor growth we present a simple analytical example that delivers this result with unique pre and post growth equilibria in this example production occurs within the cone of diversification such that factor price equalization holds we also provide general conditions that determine the sign of rybczynski s comparative statics