w hether the united kingdom (uk) should remain in the european :union: (eu) or not has been a fiercely debated issue both before and after the referendum in the uk on june 23, 2016. the main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the pros and cons of the uk leaving the eu. it is concluded that if the uk leaves the eu, the resulting economic shock would risk adverse effects on macroeconomic variab...

We use a sample of Italian manufacturing firms to study the relationship between productivity (proxied by Total Factor Productivity) and the intensity of firm participation in heterogeneous foreign markets (proxied by the ratio of exports to total sales, i.e., export intensity). We find that firm productivity is strongly negatively correlated with export intensity to low-income countries and un...

Productivity Premia for German Manufacturing Firms Exporting to the Euro-Area and Beyond: First Evidence from Robust Fixed Effects Estimations This paper makes three contributions. (1) It summarizes in tabular form a recent literature made of 36 micro-econometric studies for 16 different countries on the relationship between export destination and firm performance. (2) It reports estimates of t...

We extend the protection for sale framework by modelling non tariff barriers. Explicitly introducing partial rent capturing leads to a testable specification that bridges the gap between the theoretical Grossman and Helpman (1994) model and its empirical implementation, where coverage ratios have been used to measure protection. Our econometric analysis supports the augmented specification and ...

This paper discusses the measurement of production and employment effects of trade policy, and more broadly the effects of economic integration and globalization. First, it provides a broad-brush overview of the ex-post literature linking trade to performance, such as measures of worker displacement, adjustment costs, and econometric evidence on trade and wages. It then defines structural impac...

Mercosur has achieved important advances like the removal of intrabloc tariff and non-tariff barriers and the establishment of a common external tariff for most products. However, its ambitious plans to deepen the integration process comprising harmonisation of policies in areas like competition policy, government procurement, technical barriers and phytosanitary measures have not been implemen...

Using a simple monopoly model, we examine the effects of economic integration. We show that the number of markets and the shape of marginal revenue curves are crucial to evaluate economic integration when the marginal cost is not constant. The effects of tariff-reductions in a three-country model are in contrast with those in a two-country model. The effects also depend on what trade policy the...

The recent micro economic literature concerning exports has highlighted the importance of firms characteristics and trade costs for export decisions. Although the presence of trade costs (i.e. sunk and variable costs) are essential to describe the different export choices firms with different level of productivity make, little is known about them. The previous literature has concentrated mainly...

This paper investigates the relationship between firm heterogeneity and a firm’s decision to export, using the annual survey of Thai manufacturing firms from 2001 to 2004. A significant contribution of this paper is that we are, for the first time, able to break down FDI by country of origin to observe whether the behavior of MNEs differs by region of origin. We find that entry sunk costs and f...

Using a simple general equilibrium model with two countries and two sectors including one manufacturing sector producing (vertically) differentiated products, we first show that an international barrier to trade in the manufacturing sector creates inter-industry trade, whereas an international barrier to trade in the other sector generates intra-industry trade among vertically differentiated pr...