The decline in the costs of multinational production (MP) has led some countries to specialize in innovation and others to specialize in production. To study the aggregate and distributional implications of this phenomenon, we develop a quantifiable general equilibrium model of trade and MP....

Many of the exports of developing countries are channeled through global value chains (GVCs), which also act as conduits for new technologies. However, new capabilities and productive employment remain limited so far to a tiny sliver of globally integrated firms. GVCs and new technologies...

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on heterogeneous firms and trade, which emphasizes firm selection into international markets and reallocations of resources across firms. We discuss the empirical challenges that motivated this research and its relationship to traditional...

Why do developing countries fail to specialize in products in which they appear to have a comparative advantage? We propose a model of agricultural trade with intermediation that explains how hold-up resulting from poor contracting environments can produce such an outcome. We use the model to...

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...

This paper investigates the welfare gains from European trade integration, and the role of comparative advantage in determining the magnitude of those gains. We use a multisector Ricardian model implemented on 79 countries, and compare welfare in the 2000s to a counterfactual scenario in which...