We study the impact of large exchange rate devaluations on the cost of living at different points on the income distribution. Poor households spend relatively more on tradeable product categories, and consume lower-priced varieties within categories. Changes in the relative price of tradeables...

We quantify the role of population aging in the structural transformation process. Household-level data from the U.S. show that the fraction of expenditures devoted to services increases with household age. We use a shift-share decomposition and a quantitative model to show that U.S. population...

We investigate how multinational firms contribute to the transmission of shocks across countries using a large multi-country firm-level dataset that contains cross-border ownership information. We use these data to document two novel empirical patterns. First, foreign affiliate and headquarter...

We document that the prices of the goods consumed by high-income households are more sticky and less volatile than those of the goods consumed by middle-income households. This suggests that monetary shocks can have distributional consequences by affecting the relative prices of the goods...

We study how international trade affects manufacturing employment and the relative wage of unskilled workers when goods and services are traded with different intensities. Manufacturing trade reduces manufacturing prices worldwide, which reduces manufacturing employment if manufactures and...

We measure the proportion of real exchange rate movements accounted for by cross-country movements in relative reset prices (prices that changed since the previous period) using CPI microdata for five countries. Relative reset prices account for almost the totality of the real exchange rate...

Capital equipment - such as computers and industrial machinery - embodies skill-biased technology, in the sense that it is complementary to skilled labor. Most countries import a large share of their capital equipment, and by doing so import skill-biased technology. In this paper we develop a...

Do theoretical welfare gains from trade translate into aggregate measures of economic activity? We calculate the changes in real GDP and real consumption that result from changes in trade costs in a range of workhorse trade models, following the procedures outlined by statistical agencies in the...

Aggregate price levels are positively related to GDP per capita across countries. We propose a mechanism that rationalizes this observation through sectorial differences in intermediate input shares. As aggregate productivity and income grow, so do wages relative to intermediate input prices,...

We measure the contribution of firm-embedded productivity to cross-country income differences. By firm-embedded productivity we refer to the components of productivity that differ across firms and that can be transferred internationally, such as blueprints, management practices, and intangible...