There is strong empirical evidence that countries with lower per capita income tend to have smaller trade volumes even after controlling for aggregate income. Furthermore, poorer countries do not just trade less, but have a lower number of trading partners. In this paper, I construct and...

Correct estimates of import demand elasticities are essential for measuring the gains from trade and predicting the impact of trade policies. We show that estimates of import demand elasticities hinge critically on whether they are derived using trade quantities or trade values, and this...

Firms play a critical role in the global economy. In this paper, we survey the behavior of firms in the international economy, both in theory and in the data. We first summarize the key empirical facts that motivate the study of firms in trade. Then, we detail recent theoretical developments on...

We measure the "new" gains from trade reaped by Canada as a result of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA). We think of the "new" gains from trade of a country as all welfare effects pertaining to changes in the set of firms serving that country as emphasized in the so-called "new" trade...

The results generally confirm that Czech trade is oriented towards European countries and determined primarily by key economic factors of domestic and foreign GDP. The institutional variables remain largely insignificant, except corruption due tothe counterintuitive result that a higher...

Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...

While many studies explain the correlation between firm-level productivity and export status entirely by better firms self-selecting into exporting, a few studies find evidence of reverse causation. Especially in developing or transition economies, exporters seem to improve performance after...

We examine the empirical evidence bearing on whether UK trade is governed by a Classical model or by a Gravity model, using annual data from 1965 to 2015 and the method of Indirect Inference which has very large power in this application. The Gravity model here differs from the Classical model...

It has become common to measure the quality of exports using their unit export value (UEV). Applications of this method include studies of intra-industry trade (IIT) and analyses of industrial "competitiveness". This literature seems to assume that export quality and export price (the most...

This paper analyzes the role of product quality and labor efficiency in shaping the trade patterns and trade intensities within and across two groups of countries, the developed and richer North and the developing South. Taking prices as a proxy for quality, recent empirical literature...