We document the behavior of trade prices during the Great Trade Collapse of 2008- 2009 using transaction-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, we find that differentiated manufactures exhibited marked stability in their trade prices during the large decline in their trade...

The stability of the labor share of income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models. We document, however, that the global labor share has significantly declined since the early 1980s, with the decline occurring within the large majority of countries and industries. We show that the decrease...

The World Trade Organization forecasts that the volume of global trade will in 2009 exhibit its biggest contraction since World War II. This large drop in international trade is generating significant attention and concern. Given the severity of the current global recession, is international...

Episodes of large crises such as the Mexican crisis in 1994-1995, the East Asian crisis in 1997-1998, and the Argentine crisis in 2001-2002 are associated with large adjustments in trade flows. The dollar value of imports in Argentina, for instance, dropped by 80 percent between 2000 and 2002. A...

We use a novel dataset of online prices of identical goods sold by four large global retailers in dozens of countries to study good-level real exchange rates and their aggregated behavior. First, in contrast to the prior literature, we demonstrate that the law of one price holds perfectly within...

The share of aggregate income paid as compensation to labor is frequently used as a proxy for income inequality. If capital holdings are very concentrated among high income individuals, increasing their share of GDP, all else equal, widens the gap with poorer workers. Indeed, two striking...

We document the behavior of trade prices during the Great Trade Collapse of 2008-2009 using transaction-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, we find that differentiated manufactures exhibited marked stability in their trade prices during the large decline in their trade...

Marcus Hagedorn is Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo. Iourii Manovski is a Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Their research interests are at the intersection of macroeconomics and labor economics

The ratio of global trade to GDP declined by nearly 30 percent during the global recession of 2008-2009. This large drop in international trade has generated significant attention and concern. Did the decline simply reflect the severity of the recession for traded goods industries? Or...

Global trade fell 20 percent relative to world GDP during the global recession of 2008-2009. We develop a dynamic multi-country general equilibrium model of international trade to investigate the sources of this collapse. Our framework provides a complete accounting for what happened to...