This paper examines the response of U.S. manufacturing industries and plants to changes in trade costs using a unique new dataset on industry-level tariff and transportation rates. Our results lend support to recent heterogeneous-firm models of international trade that predict a reallocation of economic activity towards high-productivity firms as trade costs fall. We find that industries experi...

In this paper I show that corruption can attenuate the adverse effects of customs-related red tape on firm exports. I first develop a model where exporters use bribes to encourage customs officials to process their documents in an expedited manner. This lowers the delay that they face at customs. The model shows that if the value of the reduced delays is greater than the bribe payment itself, t...

This paper investigates the link between exporting and importing activities and firm performance using a rich dataset on Egyptian and Moroccan firms. We test the export premium, self-selection and learning-by-exporting hypotheses using a number of firm characteristics. Our analysis also includes importing activities as a source of learning and considers their effects on productivity changes. A ...

This paper presents a discussion of the potential channels through which international trade affects the position of low skilled workers in the European Union. After an analysis of the European Union's trade flows showing the predominant role of intra-industry trade with other industrialised countries, the discussion focuses on the potential effects of intra-industry trade on low skilled labour...

The objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to trade: trade preferences and trade facilitation. After reviewing the relevant literatures and discussing the issues which constitute problems or opportunities for practitioners and researchers in b...

We investigate how the division of aggregate income into per capita income and population affects the margins of imports. In the first part, we use data on imports of 123 countries to document a positive relationship between per capita income and both the extensive and quality margin of imports, for a given level of aggregate GDP. These relations hold at various levels of disaggregation. While ...

Using the Born-Oppenheimer idea we show that the Wheeler-DeWitt equation in an oscillating regime can also allow a different type of semiclassical quantum gravity that preserves completely the unitary quantum evolution of a matter field, which reduces the same asymptotic limit as the others. We develop a perturbation method to find the quantum corrections of a matter field to the gravity. The s...

Avian malaria caused by Plasmodium gallinaceum is an important mosquito-borne disease. Eradication of this disease remains problematic since its competent vectors are diverse and widely distributed across the globe. Several mosquito species were implicated as competent vectors for this parasite. However, studies on vector competence for P. gallinaceum remain limited. In this study, vector compe...