The impact of opening to trade on economic institutions is likely to be multifaceted and depend crucially on country-specific circumstances. In the past decade an active body of research has studied this relationship. This framework makes is especially clear why international trade opening has...

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 examines the mechanisms through which output volatility is related to trade openness using an industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade. The main results are threefold. First, sectors more open to international trade are more volatile. Second, trade is...

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 that sector pairs that experience more...

The quality of institutions-meaning the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, shareholder protection, and the like-has received a great deal of attention in recent years. The purposes of this paper are twofold. First, it studies the consequences of trade when institutional...

We analyze the relationship between international trade and the quality of economic institutions, such as contract enforcement, rule of law, and property rights. In our model, firms differ in their preferences for institutional quality, which is determined endogenously in a political economy...

"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 imperfect institutions create rents for some parties within the economy, and are a source of comparative...