The unit values of internationally traded goods are heavily influenced by quality. We model this in an extended monopolistic competition framework where, in addition to choosing price, firms simultaneously choose quality. We allow countries to have non-homothetic demand for quality. The optimal...

This paper assesses the effects of reducing tariffs under the Doha Round on market access for developing countries. It shows that for many developing countries, actual preferential access is less generous than it appears because of low product coverage or complex rules of origin. Thus lowering...

This paper identifies the effects of preferential trade agreements on trade volumes and prices using detailed trade and tariff data. It identifies demand elasticities by developing a difference in differences based method that exploits the fact that the additional wedge driven between...

This paper describes the updating of the NBER trade dataset, which now provides U.S. import and export values to the year 2001, disaggregated by Harmonized System (HS), Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), and the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) categories. In...

This paper identifies a causal effect of openness to international trade on growth. It does so by using tariff barriers of the United States as instruments for the openness of developing countries. Trade liberalization by a large trading partner causes an expansion in the trade of other...

Global trade fell 30 percent relative to GDP during the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Did this collapse result from factors impeding international transactions or did it simply reflect the greater severity of the recession in highly traded sectors? We answer this question with detailed...