international institutions and the volatility of international trade during the past half century states have established a large number of international trade institutions both multilateral and regional in scope the existing literature on this topic emphasizes that these agreements are chiefly designed to liberalize and increase the flow of overseas commerce yet such institutions have another function that has been largely ignored by researchers namely reducing volatility in trade policy and trade flows exposure to global markets increases the vulnerability of a country s output to terms of trade shocks governments seek to insulate their economies from such instability through membership in international trade institutions particularly the world trade organization wto and preferential trading arrangements ptas we hypothesize that these institutions reduce the volatility of overseas commerce we further hypothesize that because market actors prefer price stability trade institutions increase the volume of foreign commerce by reducing trade variability this article conducts the first large scale multivariate statistical tests of these two hypotheses using annual data on exports for all pairs of countries from 1951 through 2001 the tests provide strong support for our arguments ptas and the wto regime significantly reduce export volatility in so doing these institutions also increase export levels

physical appearance and wages do blondes have more fun abstract this study contributes to the economics literature that links physical characteristics to labour market outcomes by investigating the influence of hair colour on women s own wages and also their spouse s wages using u s panel data we find that blonde women receive large wage premiums

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

the assessment competition policy the paper advances four propositions concerning the objectives content and institutions of competition policy first the role of policy should be to advance economic efficiency rather than competition for its own sake or some wider definition of the public interest second economic analysis is generally ambiguous a priori about the efficiency effects of particular market structures and conduct third the design of policy and institutions needs to reflect this ambiguity policy rules are essential but there should be scope for parties to argue countervailing efficiency benefits a policy institution should be empowered to identify investigate and propose remedies for failures of competition subject to review by an independent competition tribunal fourth international harmonization of competition policies is essential current policies in the u k and ec and relationships between the two are evaluated and the case made for a radical reform of u k policy copyright 1993 by oxford university press

beauty and the labor market the authors examine the impact of looks on earnings using interviewers ratings of respondents physical appearance plain people earn less than average looking people who earn less than the good looking the plainness penalty is 5 to 10 percent slightly larger than the beauty premium effects for men are at least as great as for women unattractive women have lower labor force participation rates and marry men with less human capital better looking people sort into occupations where beauty may be more productive but the impact of individuals looks is mostly independent of occupation suggesting the existence of pure employer discrimination copyright 1994 by american economic association

growth with endogenous migration hump and the multiple dynamically interacting effects of aid in poor developing countries we show empirically that aid given to poor developing countries enhances growth and reduces emigration once several dynamically interacting effects of aid are taken into account in a system of equations we estimate equations for net immigration flows as a share of the labour force and gdp per capita growth and also for all their regressors including remittances and official development aid we use dynamic panel data methods for a sample of poor countries with gdp per capita below 1200 2000 for which aid is about 9 5 of gdp the partial effects in these regressions are as follows remittances enhance net immigration savings public expenditure on education and growth but reduce tax revenues all as a share of gdp net immigration enhances labour force growth and the savings ratio official development aid decreases the savings ratio and the per capita gdp growth rate but it increases investment public expenditure on education and literacy and also labour force growth then we integrate all equations to a dynamic system and run a simulation the result is an endogenous migration hump with several peaks in a counterfactual simulation we double aid with the result that for more than a hundred years migration is reduced and the gdp per capita is enhanced because the positive effects of aid on investment and education dominate the negative direct effects of aid on growth and the unfavourable effects on savings tax revenues and labour force growth

the impact of obesity on wages abstract previous studies of the relationship between body weight and wages have found mixed results this paper uses a larger data set and several regres sion strategies in an attempt to generate more consistent estimates of the effect of weight on wages differences across gender race and ethnicity are explored this paperjnds that weight lowers wages for white females ols esti mates indicate that a difference in weight of two standard deviations roughly 65 pounds is associated with a difference in wages of 9 percent in absolute value this is equivalent to the wage effect of roughly one and a half years of education or three years of work experience negative cor relations between weight and wages observed for other gender ethnic groups appear to be due to unobserved heterogeneity i introduction several previous studies have found among females a negative cor relation between body weight and wages there exist three broad categories of ex planations for this finding the first explanation is that obesity lowers wages for example by lowering productivity or because of workplace discrimination the sec ond is that low wages cause obesity this would be true if poorer people consume

oligopoly and the polarization of space one remarkable fact in economic geography is that production does not appear everywhere at the same time instead it occurs at a few points with variable intensity more precisely once the spatial distribution of consumption and the transportation infrastructures are given firms seem to be inexorably attracted by some particular places in economic space this results in a distribution of production characterized by a high degree of geographical polarization location theory has provided various explanations of this phenomenon see e g the surveys of fujita 1990 and stahl 1987 they often rely upon the existence of pecuniary externalities of different sorts the purpose of this note is to review some recent contributions that have shed new light on the role of more traditional factors in the agglomeration of industrial or retailing firms more precisely i want to discuss i the impact of the channelization of space created by transportation infrastructures and ii the main forces leading to geographical de concentration in the process of spatial competition in order to account for the polarization of space one must first recognize that increasing returns are essential for explaining the geographical distribution of production activities with nonincreasing returns and a uniform distribution of natural resources it would be desirable for every firm to disperse its activities among the consumption places at each of them a firm s plant would be set up in order to meet the local demand the transportation costs would then be saved and each consumption place would become an autarky put in a different way the distribution of production would mirror exactly the distribution of consumption unless the natural resources are unevenly distributed across locations while indisputably pertinent unequal distribution of resources seems weak as the main explanation for geographical polarization assume that increasing returns are now introduced into the picture their existence makes it profitable for the firms to concentrate their production in

an exclusive country club the effects of the gatt on trade 1950 94 using data on bilateral trade flows from both before and after world war ii this article examines the impact of the general agreement on tariffs and trade on trade between its members and on the system of interwar trade blocs it shows that the distribution of the benefits produced by the gatt was much more highly skewed than conventional wisdom assumes the article also shows that the gold commonwealth reichsmark and exchange control blocs exerted positive and significant effects on trade after 1945 the authors attribute these effects to the bargaining protocol that governed successive rounds of gatt negotiations the signature element of the postwar trade regime

exchange rate uncertainty and agricultural trade using a sample of bilateral trade flows across ten developed countries between 1974 and 1995 this article explores the effect of exchange rate uncertainty on the growth of agricultural trade as compared to other sectors based on a gravity model that controls for other factors likely to determine bilateral trade the results show that real exchange rate uncertainty has had a significant negative effect on agricultural trade over this period moreover the negative impact of uncertainty on agricultural trade has been more significant compared to other sectors

openness to trade in manufactures in the oecd abstract how open are the advanced economies to trade with each other in this paper openness is calculated relative to the predictions of the monopolistic competition trade model using data on manufacturing trade and production in the oecd in 1985 the paper finds that 1 japan imports much less than other large oecd countries while the european countries have larger import volumes than does the us 2 japan and the us engage in less intra industry trade than the rest of the oecd and 3 the eu countries are less open to imports from japan and the us than those countries are open to imports from the eu

the gatt in historical perspective the transformation of the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt into the world trade organization wto on january 1 1995 provides an opportune moment to take stock of the gatt s achievements and shortcomings alongside those of its 50 year old sister international institutions set up at bretton woods it is temptingly easy to attribute the astounding postwar economic expansion particularly when set against the turbulent interwar period when multilateral efforts to contain protectionist pressures failed miserably to the economic policies embodied in the gatt and to the initial stability provided by the bretton woods institutions yet a closer look at precisely what the gatt accomplished in its first decade suggests that trade liberalization under its auspices alone is far from sufficient to explain the postwar economic boom

trade barriers and the collapse of world trade during the great depression 1 introduction the contraction in world trade during the first phase of the great depression stands out as the strongest adverse shock to international trade in modern history from 1929 to 1932 world import and export volume in the industrialized nations decreased about 30 however it is not well understood which factors were responsible for the collapse the factors that have been highlighted in the literature are declining demand escalating tariff and nontariff trade barriers increasing bilateral trade agreements and international exchange rate policies the importance attributed to each of these factors has often been controversial pollard 1962 p 200 for instance argues that for britain the fall in total foreign trade as a proportion of home production was a part of a secular trend and may well not have been caused by the tariff as such by contrast khan 1946 p 246 claims that within 12 to 18 months uk nominal imports of manufactures from most of europe and the united states were reduced by something like 60 as a result of the tariff similarly saint etienne 1984 p 29 argues that by the mid 1930 s international trade had become in large proportion barter trade as a result of the tariffs and nontariff barriers empirical studies have examined the effects of trade restrictions on incomes to explain the declining trade for individual countries the studies of crucini and kahn 1996 and irwin 1998 find that the tariffs were influential for the u s imports and exports in his study of nominal imports to the european countries friedman 1974 quantified the effects of trade barriers on nominal imports and ultimately income by means of dummies in periods of significant tariffs and nontariff barriers he found that trade restrictions had a significant impact on trade in a few countries however as friedman himself acknowledges the weakness of this approach is that strong and weak forms of trade barriers are restricted to impact equally on imports in the estimates coupled with the small sample problems that plagued his estimates the trade barrier dummies were unlikely to effectively have captured the effects of trade barriers on imports which explains substantial variations of the estimated effects of the tariffs and the nontariff barriers across countries the study of eichengreen and irwin 1995 is probably the most extensive analysis of trade flows in the interwar period using 561 cross sectional bilateral trade flows over three periods 1928 1935 and 1938 they estimate a gravity model of trade patterns they relate the value of bilateral flows to national income population distance contiguity trade and currency block indicators and exchange rate variability to examine the effects on trade of trade and currency blocks and exchange rate variability they observe a declining marginal propensity to import and export during the depression which they attribute to quotas and other binding trade restrictions but do not formally test their importance this paper seeks to estimate the contribution of income tariffs and nontariff barriers on world trade during the depression using panel data for 17 countries over the period from 1920 to 1938 the panel data approach enables the assessment of the influence on trade of nontariff barriers from estimates of import and export functions by using as an identifying assumption that the nontariff barriers were to some degree simultaneously imposed and relaxed across the industrialized nations during the interwar period the estimates and extensive evidence from the literature suggest that this identifying assumption is valid section 3 in section 4 the changes in world trade in the interwar period are decomposed into income effects tariff effects and nontariff barrier effects the trade effects of the tariff changes are furthermore decomposed into deflation inflation induced tariff changes and discretionary tariff induced changes

multilateral resistance to migration the rate of migration observed between two countries does not depend solely on their relative attractiveness but also on the one of alternative destinations following the trade literature we term the influence exerted by other destinations on bilateral flows as multilateral resistance to migration and we show how it can be accounted for when estimating the determinants of migration rates in the context of a general individual random utility maximization model we propose the use of the common correlated effects estimator pesaran 2006 and apply it to high frequency data on the spanish immigration boom between 1997 and 2009 compared to more restrictive estimation strategies developed in the literature the bias goes in the expected direction we find a smaller effect of gdp per capita and a larger effect of migration policies on bilateral rates

bilateral real exchange rates and migration abstractmigrants who move across borders are to a large extent motivated by the prospect of earning higher incomes at destination which can be partly transferred back to their countries of origin via remittances this suggests that the real exchange rate can influence the incentives to migrate as it determines the purchasing power of expected income in terms of the currency of the origin country this article investigates empirically how bilateral real exchange rate fluctuations influence international migration flows to do so we build a dataset of 30 oecd destination countries and 165 origin countries over the period 1980 2011 and estimate an equation derived from a micro founded random utility maximization model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity between migrants and non migrants our results show that migration flows are highly responsive to bilateral real exchange rates a 10 real appreciation of the currency of the destination country is associated with an 18 2 19 4 increase in migratio

a closer look at the determinants of international migration decomposing cultural distance abstractusing a modified gravity model and three measures of cultural distance we employ the zero inflated negative binomial estimation technique to examine the impact of cultural distance on international migration flows we confirm the finding of prior studies that there exists a negative relationship between composite measures of cultural distance and immigrant flows extending the literature we decompose our composite cultural distance measures into their component dimensions to examine potential variability in the influences of individual dimensions on international migration we find the cultural dimensions that reflect individualism uncertainty avoidance and perceived gender roles are typically more influential in determining immigrant flows than are other cultural dimensions

determinants of intraregional migration in sub saharan africa 1980 2000 despite great accomplishments in the migration literature the determinants of south south migration remain poorly understood in an attempt to fill this gap this paper formulates and tests an empirical model for intraregional migration in sub saharan africa within an extended human capital framework taking into account spatial interaction using bilateral panel data between 1980 and 2000 we find that intraregional migration on the subcontinent is predominantly driven by economic opportunities and sociopolitics in the host country facilitated by geographical proximity the role played by network effects and environmental conditions is also apparent finally origin and destination spatial dependence should definitely not be ignored

international aspects of the great depression and the crisis of 2007 similarities differences and lessons we focus on two international aspects of the great depression financial crises and international trade and try to discern lessons for the current economic crisis both downturns featured global banking crises which were generated by boom slump macroeconomic cycles during both crises world trade collapsed faster than world incomes and the trade decline was highly synchronized across countries during the depression income losses and rises in trade barriers explain trade s collapse owing to vertical specialization and more intense trade in durables today s trade collapse is due to uncertainty and small shocks to trade costs hitting international supply chains so far the global economy has avoided the global trade wars and banking collapses of the depression perhaps owing to improved policy even so the global economy remains susceptible to large shocks owing to financial innovation and technological

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 blocs currency blocs and the reorientation of world trade in the 1930s we analyze the impact of commercial and financial policies on the reorientation of trade in the 1930s we report evidence that commercial policies attenuated prior connections between income growth and trade and that exchange rate instability marginally discouraged international trade in contrast the tendency toward regionalization commonly ascribed to the formation of trade and currency blocs was already evident to a considerable extent prior to the regional policy initiatives of the 1930s this reorientation is more properly attributed to ongoing historical forces such as commercial and financial links between countries forged over many years

politics institutions and trade lessons of the interwar era recent studies cast doubt on the value added of international trade agreements and institutions using a new data set that consists of about 35 000 observations on the trade of fifty four nations between 1919 and 1938 we examine whether this skepticism also applies to the infamous interwar trade blocs traditional historical accounts attribute to them a large drop in international trade and a rise in the political tensions that would later erupt in world war ii in this study we show that no bloc raised trade among its members as a whole or decreased trade between members and nonmembers however our findings are not wholly consistent with the skepticism recent studies express we argue that conflicts of interest among the great powers encouraged the emergence of the bloc system and also gave rise to intrabloc trade shifts consistent with the political interests of their great power hubs the political military alliances these conflicts created also reduced trade between their signatories and we argue more generally that the causal chain runs from politics to trade as a result measuring only the effect of agreements and institutions on aggregate trade between their members can generate inaccurate estimates of their value added

the impact of patent protection on us pharmaceutical exports to developing countries this article provides evidence that patent protection can have a positive effect on trade by analysing the impact of the implementation of intellectual property rights ipr in developing countries on the us exports of pharmaceutical products following intense lobbying efforts from the us pharmaceutical industry to have the trade related aspects of intellectual property rights trips agreement included in the creation of the world trade organization wto a gravity model using panel data from 1995 to 2010 suggests that the implementation of minimum standards of patent protection has increased us exports of pharmaceuticals to 108 nonadvanced countries

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

the determinants of internal migration in a developing country quantitative evidence for indonesia 1930 2000 this study specifies and estimates a gravity model for interprovincial migration in indonesia analysing five cross sections for indonesia s 26 provinces for five survey years between 1930 and 2000 we show that throughout the twentieth century economic factors were more important in the explanation of interprovincial migration patterns in indonesia than planned migration policy aimed at the redistribution of the population in addition our regression analysis demonstrates that the urban primacy of jakarta indonesia s capital had a strong effect on the direction and size of migration flows our findings thus suggest that the costly government supported migration is not very successful and that a strongly centralized government induces migration flows to the capital these findings have policy implications for other developing countries

golden fetters the gold standard and the great depression barry eichengreen oxford university press new york 1992 pp xix 448 39 95

separable but not equal the location determinants of discrete services offshoring activities in this paper we explore the question of why firms offshore particular services to specific geographic locations we draw on research related to the unique characteristics of services in trade and commerce and more recent analyses of the transnational unbundling and spatial dispersion of business processes we move beyond a simple assessment of the cost sensitivity or relative sophistication of offshoring services and develop a typology emphasizing the degree to which offshoring services activities are interactive repetitive or innovative we suggest that the location of offshoring projects will depend on the particular mix of these attributes and test this assertion using a data set of 595 export oriented offshore services projects initiated from 2002 to 2005 by us and uk company parents in 45 developed and developing countries we find that offshore location choices greatly depend on these services characteristics and in sometimes surprising ways and draw implications from our findings for international business theory policy and practice

the effects of exchange rate volatility on agricultural trade i extend cho sheldon and mccorriston s 2002 analysis of the effect of exchange rate volatility on agricultural trade among the g 10 countries to a broad sample of developed and developing nations i replicate their original finding that exchange rate volatility has a large negative impact on agricultural trade between g 10 members after controlling for agricultural export subsidies which are correlated with exchange rate volatility i show that the original impact declines by half using the extended sample i find that the effect of exchange rate volatility is much larger for developing country exporters than for developed exporters copyright 2008 oxford university press

climate instability urbanisation and international migration abstractthis paper focuses on climate induced migration we construct a simple theoretical model where in a first step climate shocks accelerate the transition from the traditional to the modern sector leading rural workers to move to urban centres within national borders while in a second step downward pressures on wages due to the greater labour supply in cities push people to engage in international migration to test this hypothesis we exploit a rich panel dataset displaying a representative picture of bilateral migration flows and climatic data across 222 countries for the period 1960 2000 findings suggest that in the next few years the climate induced growth rate of migrant stocks might be in a range between 8 6 per cent and 12 8 per cent especially from developing countries where the level of rural employment is more likely to be affected by climatic shocks

fund raising success and a solicitor s beauty capital do blondes raise more funds abstract this study uses a door to door fund raising field experiment to explore the returns to physical appearance on fund raising success interestingly blonde females earn more on average than brunette counterparts however the returns to physical appearance depend critically on the race of a potential donor

business cycle co movement evidence from the great depression abstract recent analysis focuses on the gold standard as a channel for the transmission of the great depression trade linkages which loom large in the recent literature play a smaller role both the gold standard and trade were associated with higher co movement at the bilateral level during the entire interwar period we document that fixed exchange rates and trade made a comeback after 1932 but co movement declined the fall after 1932 appears to be driven by the rise of smaller blocs based on monetary and trade cooperation and an accompanying fall in co movement between blocs

a gravity model of immigration this paper develops a gravity model of immigration tests of the model using panel data for 16 oecd countries for 1991 2000 confirm the model s high explanatory power and examples illustrate its usefulness for testing other hypothesized determinants of immigration

discriminating oligopolists and common markets we analyse the properties of a cournot nash equilibrium which arises when two monopolies operating each in a separate market become a duopoly in a common market with two sub markets the formerly separated markets and are allowed to price discriminate across sub markets this equilibrium implies intra industry trade or crosshauling of identical commodities and freight absorption which is an increasing function of the slope of the marginal cost schedule it also leads to price differences such as those observed in the european car market

does immigration boost per capita income using a cross section of countries we adapt frankel and romer s 1999 iv strategy to international labor mobility controlling for institutional quality trade and financial openness we establish a robust and non negative causal effect of immigration on real percapita income

determinants of international student migration this paper considers what factors determine the migration of overseas students when students cross borders for higher education we utilise a gravity model for international student mobility and derive estimates for a sample of 18 countries of destination and 38 countries of origin over the period 2005 11 our results confirm that geographical distance and the presence of a common language are powerful in explaining bilateral student flows our most interesting finding is that time zone differences have a statistically significant and economically large effect in determining international student flows

cournot competition yields spatial agglomeration most theoretical models of spatial competition show a strong tendency toward spatial dispersion of firms yet common observations suggest that firms tend to agglomerate in this paper the authors show that competition between cournot type oligopolists that discriminate over space leads to spatial agglomeration one implication is that firms do not necessarily earn supernormal profits at the free entry equilibrium copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

south south migration and discrimination against women in social institutions a two way relationship summary using the social institutions and gender index sigi from the oecd development centre this paper provides evidence on the two way relationship between discrimination against women in social institutions and south south migration on the one hand discriminatory social institutions in both origin and destination countries are an additional determinant of female migration on the other hand migration implies changes in discrimination against women according to the level of gender inequalities at destination specifically migration toward countries with low levels of discrimination promotes gender equality in social institutions at home while migration toward destinations with high levels of discrimination has the reverse effect

the internationalization of inventive activity a gravity model using patent data this paper discusses the extent and the determinants of the internationalization of european inventive activity between 1990 and 2004 using an innovative method to treat the information contained in the european patent office s patstat database the observed level of internationalization of inventive activities while being rather low has steadily increased over time the amount of collaboration between actors residing in different countries is assessed by means of a gravity model as it is familiar in the literature on international trade the amount of bilateral collaboration is positively affected by the presence of a common language and a common border and by the common participation in the european union participation in the euro zone is also found to have a marginally negative effect international collaboration is negatively affected by distance with estimated elasticities that are significantly smaller than the ones that characterize international trade contrary to the rumors about the death of distance this effect has become stronger in recent years

explaining spatial patterns of foreign employment in germany this paper investigates the main determinants of the representation of foreign employees across german regions since migration determinants are not necessarily the same for workers of different na

why beauty matters we decompose the beauty premium in an experimental labor market where employers determine wages of workers who perform a maze solving task this task requires a true skill which we show to be unaffected by physical attractiveness we find a sizable beauty premium and can identify three transmission channels a physically attractive workers are more confident and higher confidence increases wages b for a given level of confidence physically attractive workers are wrongly considered more able by employers c controlling for worker confidence physically attractive workers have oral skills such as communication and social skills that raise their wages when they interact with employers our methodology can be adopted to study the sources of discriminatory pay differentials in other settings

innovative strategic groups in multinational industries abstract differences in innovative strategies between groups of domestic and multinational enterprises are analyzed within a two stage game model that incorporates the asymmetries in transaction costs between the two species of enterprises nash and cooperative behaviour is shown to result in different equilibrium r d strategies with the multinational companies doing typically more r d for larger markets and domestic companies focusing on specific market segments survey data from companies operating in eleven high tech multinational industries in belgium provide support for these strategic differences and show how they are related to company performance

the impact of international trade on democracy a long run perspective the likely endogeneity between democracy and trade is addressed with an instrumental variables strategy in this article about whether international trade fosters democracy the authors use a measure of natural openness to obtain estimates of the causal impact of openness on democratization in three separate samples spanning the last 130 years a positive impact of openness on democracy is apparent in the data over the long run the post world war ii results suggest that with a rise in trade with other countries equal to a one standard deviation increase countries such as indonesia russia and venezuela could eventually become as democratic as the u s great britain or france there is some variation in the impact of openness by region that may be because trade seems to have a positive impact only when the capital to labor ratio is sufficiently high this is consistent with the idea that openness promotes democracy when it strengthens the economic fortunes of the middle class

history gravity and international finance abstract we analyse patterns of bilateral financial investment using data on us holdings of foreign bonds we document a history effect in which holdings seven decades ago continue to influence holdings today 10 15 of the cross country variation in us investors foreign bond holdings is explained by holdings 70 years ago plausibly reflecting fixed costs of market entry and exit and endogenous learning this effect is twice as large for bonds denominated in currencies other than the dollar suggesting the existence of even higher fixed costs of initiating us foreign investment in such currencies our findings point to history and path dependence as key sources of financial market segmentation

exchange rate uncertainty and us bilateral fresh fruit and fresh vegetable trade an application of the gravity model in order to analyse the effect of exchange rate uncertainty we apply an empirical gravity equation to two sets of us bilateral trade data fresh fruit over the period 1976 1999 for a panel of 26 countries and fresh vegetables over the period 1976 2006 for a panel of nine countries based on panel estimation methods and using both a moving sd measure and the peree and steinherr 1989 measure of exchange rate uncertainty the results show that us bilateral fresh fruit trade has been negatively affected by exchange rate uncertainty we also find some evidence that the exchange rate between the us dollar and the currencies of latin american trading partners accounts for most of the negative impact of exchange rate uncertainty on bilateral trade flows in fresh fruit in contrast when using panel estimation methods and both measures of exchange rate uncertainty we find no statistically significant evidence for any negative effect of exchange rate uncertainty on us bilateral fresh vegetable trade however

fixed exchange rates and trade abstract a classic argument for a fixed exchange rate is its promotion of trade empirical support for this however is mixed while one branch of research consistently shows a small negative effect of exchange rate volatility on trade another more recent branch presents evidence of a large positive impact of currency unions on trade this paper helps resolve this disconnect our results which use a new data based classification of fixed exchange rate regimes show a large significant effect of a fixed exchange rate on bilateral trade between a base country and a country that pegs to it these results suggest an economically relevant role for exchange rate regimes in trade determination since a significant amount of world trade is conducted between countries with fixed exchange rates

the effect of weather induced internal migration on local labor markets evidence from uganda relying on census data collected in 2002 and historical weather data for uganda this paper estimates the impact of weather induced internal migration on the probability for non migrants living in the destination regions to be employed consistent with the prediction of a simple theoretical model the results reveal a larger negative impact than the one documented for developed countries they further show that this negative impact is significantly stronger in ugandan regions with lower road density and therefore less conducive to capital mobility a 10 percentage points increase in the net in migration rate in these areas decreases the probability of being employed of non migrants by more than 10 percentage points

when britain turned inward the impact of interwar british protection international trade collapsed and also became much less multilateral during the 1930s previous studies looking at aggregate trade flows have argued that trade policies had relatively little to do with either phenomenon using a new dataset incorporating highly disaggregated information on the united kingdom s imports and trade policies we find that while conventional wisdom is correct regarding the impact of trade policy on the total value of british imports discriminatory trade policies can explain the majority of britain s shift toward imperial imports in the 1930s

the effect of adolescent experience on labor market outcomes the case of height taller workers receive a wage premium net of differences in family background the disparity is similar in magnitude to the race and gender gaps we exploit variation in an individual s height over time to explore how height affects wages controlling for teen height essentially eliminates the effect of adult height on wages for white men the teen height premium is not explained by differences in resources or endowments the teen height premium is partially mediated through participation in high school sports and clubs we estimate the monetary benefits of a medical treatment for children that increases height

the short and long run determinants of less educated immigrant flows into u s states we use a gravity model of migration and alternative estimation strategies to analyze how income differentials affect the flow of immigrants into u s states using annual data from the american community survey we add to existing literature by decomposing income differentials into short and long term components and by focusing on newly arrived less educated immigrants between 2000 and 2009 our sample is unique in that the vast majority of our observations take zero values models that include observations with zero flow values find that recent male immigrants respond to differences in short term gdp fluctuations between origin countries and u s states and perhaps to long term trend gdp differences as well more specifically gdp fluctuations pull less educated male immigrants into certain u s states whereas gdp trends push less educated male immigrants out of their countries of origin effects for less educated women are less robust as gdp coefficients tend to be much smaller than for men

networks and selection in international migration to spain we offer fresh evidence on the effect of migrant networks on two essential aspects of migration 1 the total scale of migration and 2 the skill composition of migration our analysis is for the remarkable case of spain which experienced a full blown immigration boom from the mid 1990s up to the global financial crisis to accommodate flexible substitution patterns across alternative migrant destinations we use a three level nested multinomial logit model we find a strong positive network effect on the scale of migration and a strong negative effect on the ratio of high skilled to low skilled migrants simplifying restrictions on the structure of cross destination substitutability are rejected by the data jel f22 j61

indirect competition with spatial product differentiation although two markets may appear to be separate sometimes one firm participates in both of them that firm provides a link between the two markets such a straddling firm transmits indirect competition from each market to the other since its actions reflect competitive conditions in both markets in a model of spatial product differentiation the author shows that indirect competition may make a market perform significantly better than the number of firms would indicate moreover total consumer surplus increases if two previously distinct markets are linked by a straddler finally the author considers implications of these results for antitrust analysis copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

trade costs 1870 2000 what has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past century and a half was it changes in global output or in the costs of international trade to address this question we derive a micro founded measure of aggregate bilateral trade costs based on a standard model of trade in differentiated goods these trade costs gauge the difference between observed bilateral trade and frictionless trade in terms of an implied markup on retail prices of foreign goods thus we are able to estimate the combined magnitude of tariffs transportation costs and all other macroeconomic frictions that impede interna tional trade but that are inherently difficult to observe we use this measure to examine the growth of global trade between 1870 and 1913 its retreat from 1921 to 1939 and its subsequent rise from 1950 to 2000 we find that trade cost declines explain roughly 55 percent of the pre world war i trade boom and 33 percent of the post world war ii trade boom while a precipi tous rise in trade costs explains the entire inter

the spatial decay in commuting probabilities employment potential vs commuting gravity we show that an employment potential capitalisation model produces estimates of the spatial decay in employment impact on land prices that are very close to the decay observed in commuting data

optimizing an international network of partially owned plants under conditions of trade liberalization for the last four decades the preferred economic philosophy in much of latin america was that of import substituting industrialization as a result multinational corporations mncs approached different countries with the expectation that each plant would primarily serve its domestic market each of these plants was partially owned by the mnc beginning in the late 1980s latin america countries began decreasing barriers to cross border trade this made competition between the units belonging to a common network possible for the first time operations which had subsisted side by side in spite of differences in costs and quality of output and which were under the control of different owners now found themselves in competition with one another and having to rationalize their efforts in this paper we analyze the problem of operating a network of plants under conditions of free trade and exchange rate fluctuations when the firms that compose it are partially owned subsidiaries of an mnc a model of three subsidiaries and four countries is developed for one industry based on actual corporate and economic data we study the problem of coordinating the activities of the subsidiaries and allocating the gains arising from coordination

does the confucius institute impact international travel to china a panel data analysis this article examines the impact of confucius institutes on inbound travel to china we estimate a panel gravity model of inbound tourism flows to china between 2004 and 2010 we use a poisson pseudo maximum likelihood estimator to control for heteroscedasticity endemic in gravity models santos silva and tenreyro 2006 we find that the presence of confucius institute s in the source country increases overall tourism in general and business and worker tourists in particular

the welfare effects of third degree price discrimination in a differentiated oligopoly this article examines the welfare effects of third degree price discrimination under oligopolistic competition with horizontal product differentiation we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for price discrimination to improve social welfare the degree of substitution must be sufficiently greater in the strong market where the discriminatory price is higher than the uniform price than in the weak market where it is lower it is verified however that consumer surplus is never improved social welfare improves solely owing to an increase in the firms profits in the case of linear demands jel d43 l11 l13 i introduction this article examines the welfare effects of oligopolistic third degree price discrimination explicitly considering product differentiation as a source of market power and strategic interaction product differentiation is one of the main reasons why firms can enjoy market power it enables them to sell products that are no longer perfect substitutes for example coca cola and pepsico sell similar types of soda although it is arguable that they differ in taste each firm thereby attracts some consumers over another as a form of price discrimination coca cola was once reported to be testing a vending machine that would automatically raise prices in hot weather 1 although the plan triggered nationwide controversy and coca cola had to abandon the project as a result it could have changed the regime of uniform pricing to one of price discrimination in the soda market how would the resulting change affect consumer welfare and firms profits in other words is third degree price discrimination good or bad answering this question is important because it helps us to evaluate price discrimination under oligopoly in this article we focus on horizontal product differentiation to consider substitutability as well as complementarity 2 by assuming a linear quadratic utility function of a representative consumer and focusing on the symmetric equilibrium of a pricing game we characterize the conditions relating to such demand properties as substitutability and complementarity required for price discrimination to improve social welfare more specifically we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for price discrimination to improve social welfare the degree of substitution must be sufficiently greater in the strong market where the discriminatory price is higher than the uniform price than in the weak market where it is lower it is also shown that aggregate output must increase for price discrimination to improve social welfare we verify however that consumer surplus is never improved by price discrimination welfare improvement from price discrimination is solely owing to an increase in firms profits in the example above the degree of substitution would be higher in the strong market i e when the temperature is high because consumers care less about which brand when it is hot weather our analysis below implies that social welfare might improve in this case the degree of substitution can vary across markets even if consumers in each market face exactly the same products because consumers taste depends on various market specific factors such as geographical and natural conditions if the strong market is where consumers demand a product more eagerly caring less about which brand in the above example individuals demand soda more eagerly in hot weather then our results suggest that price discrimination has large potential to improve social welfare 3 why does allowing price discrimination improve social welfare notice that there are two forces that determine equilibrium prices in price setting oligopoly a larger market size raises the price whereas a larger substitutability parameter lowers the price for price discrimination to raise social welfare it is necessary that a high degree of substitutability mitigates an increase in the discriminatory price in the larger market

understanding the international mobility of chinese temporary workers using unique panel data on the temporary movement of chinese workers to 191 economies during 1992 2015 i investigate the patterns and determinants of labour mobility in the services trade i estimate a gravity model of labour mobility in two categories namely overseas labour services and overseas contracted projects i find that distance proxy for migration costs and income are not the most important determinants of the latter for overseas contracted projects the dispatch of workers is not driven by their pure economic aims but by the chinese government s policies and strategies such as its overseas project promotion policy furthermore i employ the difference in differences estimation method to investigate the impact of this policy upon labour mobility the results show that the policy of promoting overseas contracted projects has causal and positive effects on labour mobility in construction related sectors

gender bias and credit access we extract an exogenous measure of gender bias from survey responses by descendants of u s immigrants on questions about the role of women in society we then use data on around 6 000 small business firms from 17 countries and find that in high gender bias countries female entrepreneurs are more likely to opt out of the loan application process and to resort to informal finance even though banks do not appear to actively discriminate against them these results are not driven by credit risk differences between female and male owned firms or by any idiosyncrasies in the set of countries in our sample

free to trade democracies autocracies and international trade trade relations we address this issue by analyzing the relationship between regime type and trade policy in a formal model of commercial policy we establish that the ratification responsibility of the legislature in democratic states leads pairs of democracies to set trade barriers at a lower level than mixed country pairs composed of an autocracy and a democracy we test this hypothesis by analyzing the effects of regime type on trade during the period from 1960 to 1990 the results of this analysis accord with our argument democratic pairs have had much more open trade relations than mixed pairs t he effects of domestic political institutions on trade policy have long been a source of controversy among social scientists despite the widespread interest that this debate has prompted however remarkably few studies have addressed the links between political regime type and commercial policy 1 most work on the political economy of trade policy that examines institutional factors focuses only on variations in policy among democracies and avoids comparing democracies with other types of regimes moreover many analyses of trade barriers especially those by economists ignore the effects of domestic political

equilibrium incentives for most favored customer clauses in an oligopolistic industry abstract this paper analyzes the economics of contemporaneous most favored customer clauses mfcc in a non cooperative n firm oligopoly in the first stage of a two stage game each firm independently decides whether to adopt mfcc in the second stage firms set prices non cooperatively given the first stage choices in contrast to work on retroactive mfcc by cooper the rand journal of economics 1986 17 377 388 our analysis shows that not adopting mfcc can be a dominant strategy the difference between our results and cooper s highlights important differences between retroactive and contemporaneous mfcc and suggests that mfcc are a less powerful facilitating practice than retroactive mfcc our analysis also sheds new light on grether and plott s economic inquiry 1984 22 497 507 experimental results regarding the effects of mfcc on average industry prices