This paper explores the economic impacts of preferential trade agreements, conditional on their level of ambition. We cluster 278 agreements, encompassing 910 provisions over 18 policy areas and estimate the trade elasticity for the different clusters. We then use these elasticities in a series...

Global imports subject to pre-shipment inspections (PSI) - a practice under which imports need to undergo a third party review process before shipment - shrank from 700 bn USD in 2010 to 87 bn in 2018. However, only little is known about the trade impact of such procedures, which on the one hand...

We study how technology adoption and changes in global value chain (GVC) integration jointly affect labor shares and business function specialization in a sample of 14 manufacturing industries in 14 European countries in 1999-2011. Our main contribution is to highlight the indirect effect of...

This paper investigates the role played by firms’ managerial skills in the heterogeneous reaction of exporters to common exogenous changes in their international competitiveness (here captured by changes in the real exchange rate). Relying on a simple theoretical framework, we show that firms...

Based on firm level data in the French manufacturing sector, we find that firms adapt quickly, strongly and through multiple channels to energy shocks, even though electricity and gas bills represent a very small share of their total costs. Over the period 1996-2019, faced with an idiosyncratic...

European integration, which culminated in the completion of the Single Market, the single currency and successive enlargements, is now faced with the question of strategic autonomy. Against this backdrop, the present paper has three objectives. First, it assesses the benefits of EU membership...

Since Gabaix (2011), the role of changes in the performance of some very large firms in shaping aggregate outcomes has been intensively studied in the economic literature. Changes in the performance of a few large firms can arise due to idiosyncratic shocks or idiosyncratic reactions to common...

This paper considers the asymmetric effect of Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) policies on heterogeneous exporters, based on matching a detailed panel of French firm exports to a new database of Trade Facilitation Indicators (TFIs) released recently by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation...

The cost of complying with a sanitary standard is certain. However, such regulatory measure is a source of uncertainty for exporting firms in relation to border rejections. Shipments may fail to pass inspections and may be refused entry into the importing country. We examine how the risk of...

Stringent Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) are expected to drive exporters out of the markets imposing these hurdles. However their impact will vary, with some exporters being able to refocus on TBT-free markets. By matching a database of TBT measures raised as concerns at the WTO (Specific...