Using an industry-level dataset of production and trade spanning 75 countries and 5 decades, and a fully speciÞed multi-sector Ricardian model, we estimate productivities at sector level and examine how they evolve over time in both developed and developing countries. We find that in both...

Firm size follows Zipf's Law, a very fat-tailed distribution that implies a few large firms account for a disproportionate share of overall economic activity. This distribution of firm size is crucial for evaluating the welfare impact of macroeconomic policies such as barriers to entry or trade...

This paper proposes a new channel through which international trade affects macroeconomic volatility. We study a multi-country model with heterogeneous firms that are subject to idiosyncratic firm-specific shocks. When the distribution of firm size follows a power law with exponent sufficiently...

A well established empirical result is that countries that trade more with each other exhibit higher business cycle correlation. This paper examines the mechanisms underlying this relationship using a large cross-country industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade. We show...

One of the most striking aspects of the recent recession is the collapse in international trade. This paper uses disaggregated quarterly and monthly data on U.S. imports and exports to shed light on the anatomy of this collapse. We find that the recent reduction in trade relative to overall...

Existing estimates of power laws in firm size typically ignore the impact of international trade. Using a simple theoretical framework, we show that international trade systematically affects the distribution of firm size: the power law exponent among exporting firms should be strictly lower in...

This paper analyzes the impact of international trade on the quality of institutions, such as contract enforcement, property rights, or investor protection. It presents a model in which institutional differences play two roles: they create rents for some parties within the economy, and they are...

We analyze theoretically and empirically the impact of comparative advantage in international trade on fertility. We build a model in which industries differ in the extent to which they use female relative to male labor, and countries are characterized by Ricardian comparative advantage in...

This paper explores the role of financial factors in the 2008-9 collapse of U.S. imports and exports. Using highly disaggregated international trade data, we examine whether the cross-sectoral variation in how much imports or exports fell during this episode can be explained by financial...

This paper studies how the degree of contract enforcement in a country influences firms'd5 financing decisions. We first document empirical facts on debt financing for two new firm-level datasets in the United Kingdom and Ecuador. In the United Kingdom, small firms borrow more relative to their...