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A number of theories in organizational economics and industrial organization suggest that vertical integration, while costly, increases productivity. It follows from firms' maximizing behaviour that higher prices in the product market ought to induce more integration. Trade policy provides a source of exogenous price variation to assess this prediction: higher tariffs should lead to higher prices and, therefore, to more integration. We construct firm-level vertical integration indices for a large set of countries and industries and exploit variation in applied most-favoured-nation tariffs to examine the impact of tariffs on firm boundaries. The empirical results provide strong support for the view that higher output prices generate more vertical integration. Our estimates of the average price elasticity of vertical integration are in the range 0.4-2.

We lay out a small open economy version of the Calvo sticky price model, and show how the equilibrium dynamics can be reduced to a simple representation in domestic inflation and the output gap. We use the resulting framework to analyse the macroeconomic implications of three alternative rule-based policy regimes for the small open economy: domestic inflation and CPI-based Taylor rules, and an exchange rate peg. We show that a key difference among these regimes lies in the relative amount of exchange rate volatility that they entail. We also discuss a special case for which domestic inflation targeting constitutes the optimal policy, and where a simple second order approximation to the utility of the representative consumer can be derived and used to evaluate the welfare losses associated with the suboptimal rules.

This paper draws on rich product-level information from the Colombian manufacturing census to present a new set of facts about importing plants and input prices. The dataset is unique in that it contains detailed, representative, consistently measured information on the unit values of all inputs and outputs of plants. For the 1982-1988 period, the dataset also contains unit values separately for domestic and imported purchases of each input. The paper interprets the new facts as suggesting that Colombian plants purchase higher-quality inputs on the import market than on the domestic market, within narrow product categories.

This paper develops a stylized, small, open economy macro model that incorporates an explicit and non-trivial role for financial intermediation. It illustrates how such a model could be used for policy analysis in an emerging market economy where policymakers are concerned about risks associated with rapid credit growth, financial dollarization, and foreign borrowing, while lacking traditional tools to effect monetary policy transmission, and hence could resort to more direct instruments, such as foreign exchange market intervention and regulatory and administrative measures. Calibrating the model to a stylized emerging European economy, the paper simulates real and financial sector implications of various external and policy-related shocks that could be used as input for monetary policy making.

Import barriers are often raised during turbulent times, as governments worry about immediate domestic concerns such as unemployment. The recent global financial crisis, however, was accompanied by an exogenous upward spike in the international price of food, which led some countries to raise export barriers, thereby exacerbating both the price spike and the international welfare transfer associated with that change in the terms of trade. As in previous price-spike periods, that response by some food-exporting countries was accompanied by a lowering of import restrictions by numerous food-importing countries, further exacerbating the international price spike. This paper provides new evidence up to 2010 on the extent of the change in domestic relative to international prices in both groups of countries, and compares it with responses during two previous food price-spike periods. It concludes that there is a need for stronger World Trade Organization disciplines on export as well as import restrictions, so as to limit the extent to which beggar-thy-neighbour government responses to international price spikes (up or down) exacerbate those shocks.

The positive correlation between real investment rates and real income levels across countries is driven largely by differences in the price of investment relative to output. The high relative price of investment in poor countries is due to the low price of consumption goods in those countries. Investment prices are no higher in poor countries. Thus, the low real investment rates in poor countries are not driven by high tax or tariff rates on investment. Poor countries, instead, appear to be plagued by low efficiency in producing investment goods and in producing consumer goods to trade for them.