Estimates of the trade elasticity based on actual trade policy changes are scarce, and the few that exist are all over the place. This paper offers a setting where an exogenous increase in a border tax can be used to estimate the trade elasticity. It shows theoretically and empirically that if...

We use Belgian data with information on domestic firm-to-firm sales and foreign trade transactions to study how international trade affects firm efficiency and real wages. The data allow us to accurately construct the domestic production network of the Belgian economy, revealing several new...

Vor 200 Jahren hat einer der Gründungsväter der modernen Volkswirtschaftslehre, David Ricardo, in seinem Buch Principles of Political Economy and Taxation die Theorie der komparativen Vorteile vorgestellt. Vom Abbau von Handelsbarrieren profitieren alle Länder, sogar die, die im Vergleich zu...

This paper provides estimates of trade costs of the Philippines with her key trading partners, and develops a framework for assessing their welfare cost. With tariff restrictions reduced significantly following several rounds of multilateral and regional trade negotiations, non-tariff barriers...

Multi-stage production is widely recognized as an important feature of the modern global economy. This feature has been incorporated into many state-of-the-art quantitative trade models, and has been shown to deliver significant additional gains from international trade. Meanwhile,...

This paper focuses on gains from trade due to rising within-firm productivity in presence of services exporting. The complementarity between exporting and investing in productivity enhancements is investigated by using descriptive regressions using rich, firm-level data for the period 2003-2011...

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset of Vietnamese firms we document a set of empirical regularities...

This paper focuses on gains from trade due to rising within-firm productivity in presence of services exporting. The complementarity between exporting and investing in productivity enhancements is investigated by using descriptive regressions using rich, firm-level data for the period...

We study the gains from trade in an economy with oligopolistic competition, firm heterogeneity, and innovation. Oligopolistic competition together with free entry make markups responsive to firm productivity and trade costs. Lowering trade costs reduces markups on domestic sales but increases...

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...

In a free-entry Cournot oligopoly model with a quadratic utility function that yields differentiated products, it is shown that there are losses from trade when the trade cost is close to the prohibitive level. Although the total number of varieties increases, there is a reduction in consumer...

I use firm-level data to show that neither the Log-normal nor the Pareto distribution can approximate the shape of the productivity distribution along the entire support. While the former underpredicts the thickness of the right tail, the latter does not capture the shape of the left one. Using...

Special and Differential Treatment for Developing Countries (SDT) constitutes a central feature of the GATT/WTO system. Its formal goal is to foster export-led growth in developing countries. Its theoretical foundations and empirical support are, however, weak at best. In particular, SDT...

We examine the gains from Chinese accession to the WTO. Using Arkolakis, Costinot, and Rodríguez-Clare (2012) we provide a new quantitative welfare measure by dividing the manufacturing sector into import and export sub-sectors. We then evaluate how the increased openness caused by China's...