This dissertation consists of four essays that contribute to the literature on international trade and labour markets. The first essay studies the interaction between economic integration, product and process innovation, and relative skill demand in a model of international oligopoly. As trade barriers are dismantled foreign competition intensifies. Competing enterprises respond by investing mo...

The search for solutions to problems in international commodity trade has been more actively pursued during the past five years than at any previous time in history. Long negotiations in the Kennedy Round were aimed both at tariff questions and at establishing international commodity arrangements. The need for improved commodity trading arrangements was emphasized by developing countries at the...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences present a challenge to standard trade models and shows how recent “heterogeneous-firm” models of int...

Institutions — quality of contract enforcement, property rights, shareholder protection, and the like — have received a great deal of attention in recent years. Yet trade theory has not considered the implications of institutional differences, beyond treating them simply as different technologies or taxes. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we propose a simple model of international t...

Colin Xu, two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the University of Virginia, the World Bank, the University of California at Davis and the Annual Meeting of the Southern Economic Association are gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies. The findings, interpretations and conclusions in this paper are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view ...

Globalisation is becoming a force that is revolutionising international trade, particularly that of animals and animal products. There is increasing interest in animal welfare worldwide, and as part of its 2001-2005 Strategic Plan the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) identified the development of international standards on animal welfare as a priority. The OIE's scientific approach to...

Feldstein and Horioka (Econ J 90:314–329, 1980) observed that saving and investment move closely together in the major OECD countries. This finding is a puzzle if national economies are characterized by one sector neoclassical production functions—with diminishing returns to capital, a high level of savings in a country should create an incentive to export capital. In this paper, we show that t...

We propose a theory that explains why international trade can widen a wage gap between top income-earners and others. In the basic model, we consider two symmetric countries in which individuals with different abilities work either as knowledge workers, who develop products produced in a differentiated-good sector, or as production workers, who engage in actual production processes. In equilibr...

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