Recent work in gender economics has identified trade as a potential determinant of female labor force participation (FLFP). It is usually suggested that FLFP rises whenever trade expands those sectors which use female labor intensively. This paper develops a theoretical model to argue that,...

We examine firm's pricing-to-market decisions in vertically differentiated industries featuring a large number of firms that compete monopolistically in the quality space. Firms sell goods of heterogeneous quality to consumers with non-homothetic preferences that differ in their income and thus...

We develop a model of vertical innovation in which firms incur a market entry cost and position themselves in the quality space. Once established, firms compete monopolistically, selling to consumers with heterogeneous tastes for quality. We establish existence and uniqueness of the pricing game...

We develop a general equilibrium model of vertical innovation in which multiple firms compete monopolistically in the quality space. The model features many firms that each hold the monopoly to produce a unique quality level of an otherwise homogenous good and consumers who are heterogeneous in...

Exporting firms do not only decide how much of their products they ship abroad but also at which frequency. Doing so, they face a trade-off between saving on fixed costs per shipments (by shipping large amounts infrequently) and saving on storage costs (by delivering just in time with small and...

Long-run bilateral trade data exhibit four empirical regularities: (i) countries import only a small fraction of all traded varieties, (ii) per capita income and the number of imported varieties correlate positively, (iii) per capita income and trade shares correlate positively and (iv) world...

If all cross-country externalities travel through the terms of trade, efficient trade agreements may simply target the terms of trade and ignore domestic policies. This argument has been advanced by several prominent studies. Simply put, it reads: terms-of-trade agreements are efficient. I show...

The workhorse model of the New Trade Theory fails to explain four strong and central patterns of postwar trade data. These patterns are, first, the massive increase in trade volumes, second, the small fraction of traded varieties the average country imports, third the correlation between per...

We assess the role of financial linkages for the transmission of sovereign risk in the Euro Crisis. Building on the narrative approach by Romer and Romer (1989), we use financial news to identify structural shocks in a VAR model of daily sovereign CDS for eleven European countries. To estimate...

Why has Swiss export performance been so strong during the past quarters despite the marked appreciation of the Swiss Franc (CHF)? What is the outlook for Swiss exports given the still elevated CHF? In this article, we shed light on these questions by analysing a panel of Swiss exports...