This paper attempts to address two long standing questions in Public Finance: (i) why is the property tax, despite popular complaints about its fairness, the almost exclusive tax instrument used by local governments, and (ii) why do we consistently observe higher levels of governments undermine...

This paper explores the relationship between exchange rate pass-through and market share for monopolistically competitive exporters. Under fairly general assumptions we show that pass-through should be high for exporters based in a country with a very large share of total destination market...

We present a general equilibrium model of the decisions of firms to innovate and to engage in international trade. We use the model to analyze the impact of a reduction in international trade costs on firms' process and product innovative activity. We first show analytically that if all firms...

We show in a multi-sector, heterogeneous-firm trade model that the effect of tariffs on entry, especially in the presence of production linkages, can reverse the traditional positive optimal tariff argument. We then use a new tariff dataset, and apply it to a 189-country, 15-sector version of...

We incorporate trade imbalances into a quantitative model of bilateral trade in manufactures, dividing the world into forty countries. Fitting the model to 2004 data on GDP and bilateral trade we calculate how relative wages, real wages, and welfare would differ in a counterfactual world with...

We investigate the relationship between GDP per capita, trade costs, demand, and income inequality between 1996 and 2011. Specifically we apply the aggregate AIDS-based gravity model as developed in Fajgelbaum and Khandelwal (2016) to a panel of 40 countries to generate a new measure of market...

The Melitz model highlights the importance of the extensive margin (the number of firms exporting) for trade flows. Using the World Bank's Exporter Dynamics Database (EDD) featuring firm-level exports from 50 countries, we find that around 50% of variation in exports is along the extensive...

We develop a multi-sector gravity model with heterogeneous workers to quantify the aggregate and group-level welfare effects of trade. We estimate the model using the structural relationship between China-shock driven changes in manufacturing employment and average earnings across US groups...

We examine how deep agreements on domestic regulations affect welfare in a world where such agreements are influenced by producer lobbies. The answer to this question depends in a critical way on whether the agreement focuses on product standards or on production regulations. International...

We study unanticipated tariffs on imports of intermediate goods in a setting with firm-to-firm supply relationships. Firms that produce differentiated products conduct costly searches for potential input suppliers and negotiate bilateral prices with those that pass a reservation level of match...