The existence of a large border effect is considered as one of the main puzzles of international macroeconomics. We show that the border effect is, to a large extent, an artefact of geographic concentration. In order to do so we combine international flows with intranational flows data characterised by a high geographic grid. At this fine grid, intranational flows are highly localised and dropp...

This paper investigates whether differences across countries in overall country-specific trade costs affect comparative advantage. It does so by examining whether the commodity composition of countries’ trade is driven by differences in countries’ trade costs, as well as by differences in traditional factor endowments. Industry export shares across up to 71 countries and 158 manufacturing indus...

Realization of comparative advantage (David Ricardo) raises issues of income distribution that emerge when specialization gains are achieved. While the Stolper-Samuelson theorem ‘predicts’ that because of trade liberalization in ‘rich countries’ like Austria or Germany wages may fall and real incomes of capital owners might increase, some doubts are raised whether continuous cuts in relative wa...

International trade exposure affects job creation and destruction along the intensive margin (job flows due to expansions and contractions of firms’ employment) as well as along the extensive margin (job flows due to births and deaths of firms). This paper uses 1992-2010 yearly employment data from the universe of U.S. establishments to construct job flows at both the industry and commuting-zon...

We examine how foreign ownership of a firm affects the variety of goods that the firm exports and the number of countries it trades with. We construct a simple theoretical model of how foreign ownership may affect these extensive margins of exports and take this model to data from Germany, one of the leading actors on the world market for goods. In line with theoretical predictions we find that...

Productivity Effects of International Outsourcing: Evidence from Plant Level Data* We investigate the impact of international outsourcing on productivity using plant level data for Irish manufacturing. Specifically, we distinguish the effect of outsourcing of materials from services inputs. Moreover, we examine whether the impact on productivity is different for plants being more embedded in in...

Using a panel data set of bilateral export flows from 12 EU countries to 20 OECD trading partners over the period 1992-2003, a panel cointegration approach to estimating the gravity model is adopted to test for the significance of European regional integration. A comparison of the results indicates that a positive and significant coefficient estimate of the EU dummy variable is found for both t...

This paper examines GMM and ML estimation of econometric models and the theory of Hausman tests with sampling weights. Weighted conditional GMM can be more e$cient than weighted conditional MLE, an ine$cient alternative to full information MLE under choice-based sampling, unless regressions have homoscedastic additive disturbances or sampling weights are independent of exogenous variables. GMM ...

This paper develops a new asymptotic theory for two-step GMM estimation and inference in the presence of clustered dependence. The key feature of alternative asymptotics is the number of clusters G is regarded as small or fixed when the sample size increases. Under the small-G asymptotics, this paper shows the centered two-step GMM estimator and the two continuously-updating GMM estimators we c...

WTO Accession and Performance of Chinese Manufacturing Firms* China’s policy-makers argued that WTO accession and the accompanying trade liberalization would have a beneficial impact on the domestic economy. China’s import tariffs differed tremendously across industry in the earlier years, but converged to an almost uniform low level after WTO entry. We exploit sectoral variation in the extent ...