The field of international trade has undergone significant theoretical and empirical advancements over the last twenty-five years. A key breakthrough has been the emergence of firm-level approaches to studying exporting, importing, and global value chains. The field has also experienced a...

We develop a tractable framework for the analysis of the relationship between contractual incompleteness, technological complementarities, and technology adoption. In our model a firm chooses its technology and investment levels in contractible activities by suppliers of intermediate inputs....

We exploit plausibly exogenous geographical variation in the reduction in domestic demand caused by the Great Recession in Spain to document the existence of a robust, within-firm negative causal relationship between demand-driven changes in domestic sales and export flows. Spanish manufacturing...

We develop a model of human interaction to analyze the relationship between globalization and pandemics. Our framework provides joint microfoundations for the gravity equation for international trade and the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model of disease dynamics. We show that there are...

The importance of time in production was emphasized by Classical economists and was at the core of the Austrian capital theory proposed by Böhm-Bawerk and further elaborated by Wicksell, Hicks, Dorfman, and many others. A central concept in this literature is the existence of an 'average period...

We generalize the Antras and Helpman (2004) model of the international organization of production in order to accommodate varying degrees of contractual frictions. In particular, we allow the degree of contractibility to vary across inputs and countries. A continuum of firms with heterogeneous...

I offer an overview of some key conceptual aspects associated with the rise of global value chains (GVCs). I outline a series of alternative interpretations and definitions of what the rise of GVCs entails, and I trace the implications of these alternative conceptualizations for the measurement...

This paper surveys the recent body of work in economics on the importance of global value chains (GVCs) in shaping international trade flows and multinational activity. On the empirical front, we begin reviewing several variants of the "macro approach" to measuring the relevance of global...

This paper evaluates the extent to which the world economy has entered a phase of de-globalisation, and it offers some speculative thoughts on the future of global value chains in the post-COVID-19 age. Although the growth of international trade flows relative to that of GDP has slowed down...

Multinational firms (MNEs) accounted for 42 percent of US manufacturing employment, 87 percent of US imports, and 84 of US exports in 2007. Despite their disproportionate share of global trade, MNEs' input sourcing and final-good production decisions are often studied separately. Using newly...