This paper shows that the gains from opening up to international trade are smaller when firms do not fully internalize downward risk. I develop a general equilibrium model with two key assumptions. First, when faced with adverse productivity shocks, employers can lay off workers without fully...

This paper shows that the share of exports in the total sales of a firm has a positive and substantial impact on the volatility of its sales. Decomposing the volatility of sales of exporters between their domestic and export markets, I show using an identification strategy based on a...

We show using detailed firm-level Chinese data that, among small exporters, firms selling to a more diversified set of countries have more volatile exports, while the opposite holds among large exporters. This result, which stands in marked contrast to standard portfolio theory for small...

This paper examines the effects of trade liberalization between symmetric countries on the skill premium. I introduce skilled and unskilled labour in a model of trade with heterogeneous firms à la Melitz (2003) and assume a production technology such that more productive firms are more skill...

This paper analyzes the effects of trade liberalisation on the political support for policies that redistribute income between workers in different sectors. We allow for worker heterogeneity and imperfect mobility of workers across sectors, giving rise to a trade-off between redistribution and...