Nike and other brand companies have long been the target of widespread criticism for outsourcing their manufacturing production to contract factories with dismal working conditions. Despite the overwhelming amount of public interest, there exists no theory for studying this topic. The current paper fills this gap. In the model, the most productive firms in the North make high profits and outsou...

This paper analyses the scope for collusive behaviour within the context of an international duopoly supergame in which both firms and monopoly labour unions interact strategically. We find that the presence of unions, implying an endogenisation of production costs, dramatically alters the incentives for inter-firm collusion. There are, however, strong incentives for the unions to collude, rais...

We consider the likely economic impact and prospects for monetary integration among Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation and Ukraine as part of the Single Economic Space they have agreed to set up. A monetary union among these countries poses three interesting issues for the structure and process of integration: they have already been members of a wider currency union that collapsed, so ...

How large are the welfare gains from trade when factors are misallocated due to domestic distortions? In this paper I provide a quantitative answer to this question by incorporating distortions to the allocation of labor across broad sectors into a model of structural change and Ricardian trade. Calibrating the model using 36 years of data for a diverse set of countries I find that (1) gains fr...

Wage Setting in the Colombian Manufacturing Industry We show that wage setting in the Colombian manufacturing industry is not fundamentally driven by labor productivity in contrast to the standard theoretical prediction. On the contrary, internal institutional arrangements – payroll taxation, the minimum wage or the price wedge between manufacturing and consumption prices – together with a high...

Using an administrative data set containing daily information on individual workers’ employment histories, we investigate how workers’ labour market transitions are affected by international outsourcing. In order to do so, we estimate hazard rate models for match separations, as well as for worker flows from employment to another job, to unemployment, and to nonparticipation. Outsourcing is fou...

Cellulosome is a kind of multienzyme complex that displays high activity, selectivity, and stability. Here, we report a novel, non-cellulolytic, cellulosome-like multienzyme complex that produced by the Cellulosimicrobium cellulans wild-type strain F16 isolated from soil microflora. This multienzyme complex, with excellent catalytic efficiency of kcat 13.2 s(-1) to remove the C-7 xylosyl group ...

Better prospect for agricultural exports and productivity should increase agricultural wage. However, we argue that such an outcome depends on the capital movement between the formal and informalmanufacturing sectors. This is shown in a model that demonstrates a close link between agricultural and informal wage. Presence of an informal sector may lead to reverse migration from the urban to the ...

Recent theoretical models show that international trade can induce within-industry skillupgrading by raising R&D intensity and creating skill-biased technologies. This paper tests this assertion by estimating the effect of rising import shares on wage shares for 4-digit SIC US manufacturing industries. Using Arellano-Bond estimation to account for the endogeneity of imports, I find that neither...

The dominant perspective in discussions of labor and environmental standards and globalization is that of North-South competition and its impact on Northern standards. This paper presents an alternative perspective, that of South-South competition to export to the North, and its impact on Southern standards. It develops a simple model of Southern competition on standards, which can begin to pro...