Reputation is generally considered an asset, especially in e-commerce markets. Any reputation system, however, elicits strategic responses from the sellers. Using panel data on a large random sample of online sellers from China’s largest e-commerce platform, Taobao.com, we study how...

From 1992 to 2011, the total trade volume between the U.S. and China increased by 25 times, and China's share in U.S. total imports increased from 5% to 20%. However, the U.S.'s share in China's total imports dropped from 11% to 8% in the same period. In the major categories of U.S. exports to...

A growth model is developed to explain how the improvement in the endowment structure leads to industrial evolution in a closed developing economy. On the balanced growth path industries will endogenously upgrade toward the more capital-intensive ones in a continuous inverse-V-shaped pattern: As...

This paper aims to provide a theory of current account adjustment that generalizes the textbook version of the intertemporal approach to current account and places domestic labor market institutions at the center stage. In general, in response to a shock, an economy adjusts through a combination...

In this paper, we first document the patterns of structural adjustments in Chinese manufacturing production and exports using a firm level data from China. We find that manufacturing production became more capital intensive while exports became more labor intensive from 1999 to 2007. To explain...

Sticky (or slow-adjusting) current accounts are observed for many countries. This paper explores the role of domestic factor market flexibility in understanding the phenomenon. To do so, we consider multiple tradable sectors with different factor intensities and allow substitution between...

In partial equilibrium, a reduction in import barriers may be thought to lead to an increase in imports and a reduction in trade surplus. However, the general equilibrium effect can go in the opposite direction. We study how trade reforms affect current accounts by embedding a modified...

Using data from 24 OECD countries, we find that the relationship between a country¡¯s R&D investment and technological advantage in a sector (measured by the country¡¯s labor productivity of the sector relative to the rest of the world) is non-monotonic. In particular, for countries whose...