What is the impact of terrorism on trade through higher security at the borders? We set up a theory which shows that the impact goes not only from terrorism to trade. Higher trade with a partner might, in return, increase the probability of terrorism acts by making security measures more costly for total welfare. In order to identify the true impact of terrorism, our theory allows then for a st...

This paper analyzes the role of production distortion for income redistribution in an international trade model. In particular, this paper examines the role of the Stolper and Samuelson effect (Stolper and Samuelson 1941) on efficient income redistribution. It first shows that production inefficiency can be a part of a Pareto-efficient tax system when there is an asymmetric information problem ...

The number of regional trade agreements has nearly doubled in the last four years. Interestingly, relatively small countries have put enormous effort into joining regional agreements with larger countries during this period. In this paper, we address the following question: why are small countries so eager to be a part of these agreements? We construct a general equilibrium model of a natural t...

The majority of African countries implemented import liberalisation in the 1990s. This paper explores factors that may explain the pattern of protection and of tariff reform. We consider political economy explanations, motivated specifically by the Grossman and Helpman (1994) model of protection in response to industry lobbies, and the possibility that reforms are technocratic. Using industry-l...

This paper provides new estimates of the effects of corruption and poor institutions on trade protection. It exploits data on several measures of trade protection including import duty, international trade taxes, and the trade-GDP ratio. The paper complements the literature on the relationship between corruption and trade reform. It deviates from the previous literature in several ways. First, ...

This paper studies the relationship between export activities and firm-level productivity. Unique matching of German and Austrian micro data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that exporters are more productive by around 40 percent compared with non-exporters. Moreover, beside other analysis techniques, instrumental variable estimations suggest that exporting causes a rise in firm-level productivity. T...

In the “Protection for Sale” model of Grossman and Helpman (1994), some industries are assumed to be able to overcome the free-rider problem and organize a lobby that represents their group interests while other industries are unable to form a lobby. This dichotomy presents a problem for the many papers that attempt to estimate the model empirically since every industry must be classified as ei...

In popular discussion much has been made recently of the susceptibility of government policies to lobbying by foreigners. The general presumption has also been that such interactions have a deleterious effect on the home economy. However, it can be argued that, in a trade policy context, bending policy in a direction that would suit foreigners may not in fact be harmful: If the policy outcome a...

The present paper thoroughly explores second-best efficient allocations in an adverse selection insurance economy. We start from a natural extension of the classical model, assuming less than perfect risk perceptions. We propose first and second welfare theorems, by means of which we describe efficiencyenhancing policies. Notions of weak and strong adverse selection are promising for interpreti...

The labour productivity impact of innovation of manufacturing firms in Bangladesh and Pakistan, a highly neglected region for such studies compared with the developed world, is studied in this paper by using World Bank Enterprise Survey data conducted in 2006. To achieve this end, we apply the Cobb-Douglas production function, augmented with innovation-related (and other expected sources of pro...