We explore in this paper the role of export subsidies when goods arriving from foreign countries are initially of unknown quality to domestic consumers, who learn about their quality only through consumption. If, when confronted with such goods, consumers view price as a signal of quality, a...

International trade became much less multilateral during the 1930s. Previous studies, looking at aggregate trade flows, have argued that discriminatory trade policies had comparatively little to do with this. Using highly disaggregated information on the UK's imports and trade policies, we find...

Ex-post firm heterogeneity can result from different strategies to overcome labor market imperfections by ex-ante identical firms—with far-reaching consequences for the welfare effects of trade. With asymmetric information about workers' abilities and costly screening, in equilibrium some...

We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. In contrast to canonical export models where firm profits are additively separable across destination markets, global sourcing decisions...

Large firms play a pivotal role in international trade, shaping the export patterns of countries. We propose and quantify a granular multi-sector model of trade, which combines fundamental comparative advantage across sectors with granular comparative advantage embodied in outstanding individual...