I develop and implement a methodology for obtaining plant-level estimates of product quality from revenue and physical output data. Intuitively, firms that sell large quantities of output conditional on price are classified as high quality producers. I use this method to decompose cross-plant...

In this paper, I quantify the impact of price variability on homogeneous intermediate goods imports. In product-level data, I find a country's share of US imports is decreasing in the level and the variance of its unit price. This finding is consistent with a model of sourcing decisions in which...

This paper uses data on U.S. manufacturing establishments to study the spatial real- location of resources that takes place within surviving firms as they open and close establishments in different regions. To motivate the empirical analysis, I extend existing models of industry dynamics to...

This paper quantifies the separate contributions of product quality and technical efficiency in explaining variation in export outcomes across U.S. manufacturing plants. Unlike previous plant-level studies that rely on unit values, I obtain direct measures of idiosyncratic demand from price and...

The impact of international trade, or “openness”, on economic growth is difficult to quantify because of reverse causality. In this paper, I use recent advances in gravity equation estima- tion to generate a geography-based instrument for openness a la Frankel and Romer (1999). In contrast...

This paper develops a framework for studying the general equilibrium effects of endogenous quality upgrading, a new margin of trade, on the welfare impact of trade liberalization. Unlike Fajgelbaum et al. (2011) which studies the effect of non homothetic preferences on output quality and...