Productivity Improvements and Falling Trade Costs: Boon or Bane?

This paper looks at two features of globalization, namely productivity improvements and falling trade costs, and explores their effect on welfare in a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms and technological asymmetries. Contrary to received wisdom, and for reasons unrelated to adverse terms of trade effects, we show that there is good reason to expect improvements in a partner's productivity to hurt us. Moreover, falling trade costs can raise welfare in the technologically advanced country while reducing it in the backward one if it is backward enough.

Firm Heterogeneity and Firm Behavior with Conditional Policies

This paper shows that the result of Ju and Krishna (2002, 2005), i.e., the non-monotonicity in the comparative statics across regimes, disappears, if exporters differ in their productivities, which provides very different predictions about the results of policy changes.

Trade and Trade Policy with Differentiated Products: A Chamberlinian-Ricardian Model: A Comment

This paper shows that the results of Venables (1987) depend critically on the assumption that there are no fixed costs of trade. The introduction of fixed costs of exporting, while making the model more consistent with the empirical evidence, leads to the opposite conclusion that technological progress in one country cannot harm the welfare of its trading partner. However, the results can be obtained in a richer setting with heterogeneous firms.

The Impact of Crises on Youth Unemployment of Russian Regions: An Empirical Analysis

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the influence of the 1998 and 2008 crises on the youth unemployment rates (age class 20-29) in Russian regions. The investigation is founded on the panel data for 78 Russian regions during 1997–2008 provided by ROSSTAT (the main Russian State statistical organization). We compare the level and dynamics of the youth unemployment in various Russian regions and try to solve three main questions. Are there any special features of the youth unemployment in comparison with overall unemployment? How the 1998 crisis did change - and how the 2008 crisis is going to change - the youth unemployment dynamics? What can we learn from the impact of 1998 crisis and what is the main difference with the impact of the 2008 crisis? With the help of the obtained results we define some preliminary policy suggestion.financial crises, regional youth unemployment, Russian labour market.