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In this paper, we examine how a trade conflict's impact on the real economy can be amplified by financial intermediaries. After the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, China in practice banned imports of Norwegian salmon. The ban was an unexpected trade shock to the Norwegian salmon industry. Using bank balance sheet and credit register data, we trace how this trade shock affected the lending behavior of banks highly exposed to the salmon industry when the shock occurred. We find that, in the years following the trade shock, highly exposed banks cut back lending to non-salmon firms and households by 3-6 percent more than other banks. Furthermore, we find that the reduction in lending was not driven by the erosion of bank capital, but rather by the shift in expectations about the performance of loans to salmon producers, which drove highly exposed banks to increase their loan loss provisions and reduce risk-taking.

We study the role and drivers of persistence in the extensive margin of bilateral trade. Motivated by a stylized heterogeneous firms model of international trade with market entry costs, we consider dynamic three-way fixed effects binary choice models and study the corresponding incidental parameter problem. The standard maximum likelihood estimator is consistent under asymptotics where all panel dimensions grow at a constant rate, but it has an asymptotic bias in its limiting distribution, invalidating inference even in situations where the bias appears to be small. Thus, we propose two different bias-corrected estimators. Monte Carlo simulations confirm their desirable statistical properties. We apply these estimators in a reassessment of the most commonly studied determinants of the extensive margin of trade. Both true state dependence and unobserved heterogeneity contribute considerably to trade persistence and taking this persistence into account matters significantly in identifying the effects of trade policies on the extensive margin., CEPA Discussion Papers; 36

This paper explores the robustness of the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) hypothesis. We analyze a panel of OECD countries from 1970 to 2008 and compare three different datasets on sectoral productivity, including a newly constructed database on total factor productivity. Overall, our DOLS estimation results do not support the BS hypothesis. For the last two decades, we find a very robust negative relationship between the productivity in the tradable sector and the equilibrium real exchange rate, in contrast to BS. Earlier supportive findings depend strongly on the choice of the dataset. Except for the terms of trade, the explanatory power of other variables is weak.

This paper analyses and quantifies the effects of trade liberalisation and skill-biased technical change, both exogenous and trade-induced, on the skill premium and real wages of unskilled and skilled workers in the Mexican manufacturing sector, using industry- and firm-level data for 1984-1990 from the Encuesta Industrial Anual. The novelty of the paper lies in its strategy for identifying causality, which uses differences across industries over time in the relative price of machinery and equipment in the US as an instrument for skill-biased technical change. The effect of trade-induced SBTC on wages, and especially on wage inequality, appears substantial. The regressions show that trade liberalisation and changes in the relative price of equipment in the US, which induce exogenous SBTC in Mexico, explain one quarter of the increase in relative skilled wages between 1984 and 1990. This rise in the skill premium due to SBTC and trade liberalisation mainly reflect a rise in real skilled wages, although with some specifications it was amplified by a fall in the real wages of unskilled workers.

While political instability is broadly believed to be bad for economic growth., firm performance and foreign direct investment, few studies convincingly identify the causal impact of conflict on firms and export performance. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the Kenyan post-election violence on a hugely successful export oriented industry, the Kenyan flower industry,. Using export information on all Kenyan grower-exporters, we show that the conflict reduced Kenyan flowere exports by 24% overall. To account for demand shocks in the export markets, we then exploit the cross-regional variation in the post-election violence to identify the effect of the conflict on firms export volumes. We find that the conflict reduced exports by 23% for firms located in conflict areas, mainly through displacing workers. The displacement of semi-skilled workers is also shown to have had impacts substantially beyond the duration of the conflict. While there is no evidence to suggest that the conflict affected export volumes in the areas without conflict, we find evidence that it did change exporters behaviour. Shipments were consolidated and exported less frequently, while security expenses rose. This suggests that exporters in non-conflict areas reacted to the increased insecurity by transporting larger, more secured shipments to the airport less frequently.

The interwar years saw the rise of New York to challenge London as the world’s leading provider of financial services. This paper will show that the current explanations fail to identify a key factor in New York’s rise. The City was prevented from operating a full capacity by a capital issues embargo, imposed by the Bank of England to support the pound. As a result, New York was able to enter the sector with little competition from London, and expand rapidly to issue over half of the global capital exported abroad in the 1920s. Without the embargo, this would not have been possible, as the London merchant banks were the most productive producers in the industry, a position built up over the previous half century. This result challenges the consensus that the return to gold was good for the City. The merchant banks suffered and lost business, suggesting that this policy was even more disastrous than is currently thought.

The causes of the USA's exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India. Habakkuk's views on the causes of American industrial pre-eminence are reassessed. While the USA had abundant natural resources, they did not promote manufacturing since international trade equalized prices in Britain and the USA or American tariffs made resources dearer in the USA. Wages were higher in the USA than in Britain since labor markets were tightly integrated and labor was drawn to the USA as the continent was settled. Capital services were also more expensive in USA. American industrialization required tariffs since virtually all input prices were higher than in Britain and industrial productivity was comparable. America's comparative advantage shifted from agriculture to manufacturing after 1895 was industrial productivity soured. This was due to a fall in energy prices in the USA, the American policy of mass schooling which increased the supply of skilled adults and induced firms to invent technology to raise their productivity since the supply of child labor was restricted in comparison to Britain, and the great growth of manufacturing investment induced by the tariff which provide a large market for inventions and generated technical knowledge through learning by doing. Egypt and India could not have industrialized by following American policies since their wages were so low and their energy costs so high that the modern technology that was cost effective in Britain and the USA would not have paid in their circumstances. The development of Egypt and India required more draconian state intervention than a protective tariff, mass education, and infrastructure investment - the American model.

In this paper, we assess the role of skilled versus unskilled migration for bilateral trade using a flexible reduced-form model where the stocks of skilled and unskilled migrants at the country-pair level are determined as endogenous continuous treatments. The impact of different levels of skilled and unskilled migration on the volume and structure of bilateral trade is identified in a quasi-experimental design. This is accomplished through a generalization of propensity score estimation procedures for a case of multivariate, multi-valued treatments whereof the bivariate continuous treatment model is a special case. We find evidence of a polarized impact of skill-specific migration on trade: highly concentrated skilled or unskilled migrants induce higher trade volumes than a balanced composition of the immigrant base. Regarding the structure of trade, we observe a polarization specifically for differentiated goods and for north-south trade. Both bits of evidence are consistent with a segregation of skill-specific immigrant networks and corresponding consumption patterns and effects on trade.

The note presents the computation of industry foreign inputs dependency using input-output tables. It gives details on each level of dependency and finish with the infinite computation using the Leontief inverse matrix. It ends with some evidence by using WIOT data from 2000 to 2014 which shows the high growth of the technical dependency to Chinese inputs over the past 15 years. Construction, Telecommunications and Chemicals are Chinese-dependent sectors among the 20 first which also contribute a lot to the French economy. Nevertheless, for France and European countries, the dependency to Chinese inputs is well behind the dependency to European inputs.

We develop a new method to estimate the parameters of threshold distributions for market participation based upon an agent-specific attribute and its decision outcome. This method requires few behavioral assumptions, is not data demanding, and can adapt to various parametric distributions. Monte Carlo simulations show that the algorithm successfully recovers three different parametric distributions and is resilient to assumption violations. An application to export decisions by French firms shows that threshold distributions are generally right-skewed. We then reveal the asymmetric effects of past policies over different quantiles of the threshold distributions.

Concerns about carbon offshoring, namely the relocation of dirty tasks abroad, undermine the efficiency of domestic carbon mitigation policies and might prevent governments from adopting more ambitious climate policies. This paper is the first to analyse the extent and determinants of carbon offshoring at the firm level. We combine information on carbon emissions, imports, imported emissions and environmental policy stringency based on a unique dataset of 5,000 French manufacturing firms observed from 1997 to 2014. We estimate the impact of imported emissions on firm’s domestic emissions and emission intensity using a shift-share instrumental variable strategy. We do not find compelling evidence of an impact of carbon offshoring on total emissions, but show that emission efficiency improves in companies offshoring emissions abroad, suggesting that offshored emissions are compensated by an increase in production scale. The effect is economically meaningful with a 10% increase in carbon offshoring causing a 4% decline in emission intensity. However, this effect is twice as small as that of domestic energy prices and, importantly, does not appear to be driven by a pollution haven motive.

This paper uses a natural experiment to assess whether temporary protection from trade with industrial leaders can foster development of infant industries in follower countries. Using a new dataset compiled from primary sources, I find that in the short-run regions (départements) in the French Empire which became better protected from trade with the British for exogenous reasons during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) increased capacity in a new technology, mechanised cotton spinning, to a larger extent than regions which remained more exposed to trade. Temporary protection had long term effects. In particular, by exploiting the fact that the post-war location of the cotton industry was determined to a large extent by the historical accident of the wars, I first show that the location of cotton spinning within France was persistent, and firms located in regions with higher post-war spinning capacity were more productive 30 years later. Second, I find that after the restoration of peace, exports of cotton goods from France increased substantially, consistent with evolving comparative advantage in cottons. Third, I show that as late as 1850, France and Belgium - both part of the French Empire prior to 1815 - had larger cotton spinning industries than other Continental European countries which were not protected from British trade during the wars; this suggests that adoption of the new technology was far from inevitable.

We incorporate trade in tasks a la Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into a small open economy version of the theory of firm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how offshoring affects the way firms organize. We show that the offshoring of production tasks leads firms to reorganize with a more decentralized management, improving the competitiveness of the offshoring firms. We show further that the offshoring of managerial tasks relaxes the constraint on managers but toughens competition, and thus has an ambiguous impact on the level of decentralized management and CEO wages of the offshoring firms. In sufficiently open economies, however, managerial offshoring unambiguously leads to more decentralized management and to larger CEO wages. We test the predictions of the model based on original firm level data we designed and collected of 660 Austrian and German multinational firms with 2200 subsidiaries in Eastern Europe. We find that offshoring firms are 33.4% more decentralized than non-offshoring firms. We find further that the average fraction of managers offshored reduces the level of decentralized management by 3.1%, but increases the level of decentralized management by 4% in industries with a level of openness above the 25th percentile of the openness distribution. Lastly, we find that one additional offshored manager lowers CEO wages relative to workers by 4.9%.

We study the effects of a positive export shock on labor allocation between the informal, microenterprise sector and the formal firm sector in a low-income country. The United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement led to large reductions in US tariffs on Vietnamese exports. We find that the share of manufacturing workers in Vietnam in the formal sector increased by 5 percentage points in response to the US tariff reductions. The reallocation was greater for workers in more internationally integrated provinces and for younger cohorts. We estimate the gap in labor productivity within manufacturing across the informal and formal sectors. This gap and the aggregate labor productivity gain from the export-induced reallocation of workers across the two sectors are reduced when we account for worker heterogeneity, measurement error, and differences in labor intensity of production. (JEL F16, J24, O14, O17, O19, P23, P33)

Large multi-product firms dominate international trade flows. This paper documents new facts about multi-product manufacturing exporters that are not easily reconciled with existing multi-product models. Using novel linked production and export data at the firm-product level, we find that the overwhelming majority of manufacturing firms export products that they do not produce. Three quarters of the exported products and thirty percent of export value from Belgian manufacturers are in goods that are not produced by the firm, so-called Carry-Along Trade (CAT). The number of CAT products is strongly increasing in firm productivity while the number of produced products that are exported is weakly increasing in firm productivity. We propose a general model of production and sourcing at multi-product firms. While the baseline model fails to reconcile the relationships between firm productivity and the numbers of exported products observed in the data, several demand and supply-side extensions to the model are more successful. Looking at export price data, we find support for a novel theoretical extension based on demand-scope complementarities.

The role of migrant networks in reducing the information frictions that inhibit international trade has been discussed extensively. Yet the causality from migration to trade creation has not been conclusively established. This paper provides cogent evidence of the causal pro-trade eect of migrants by drawing upon the exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People to the US. This episode represents an ideal natural experiment as it combines a large immigration shock with a concurrent trade embargo in tandem with an exogenous allocation of Vietnamese migrants across US States. Following the lifting of the trade embargo in 1994, exports to Vietnam were higher and more diversied from those US States with larger Vietnamese populations, itself the result of larger refugee inows 20 years earlier. A 10% increase in a Vietnamese State population is associated with a ratio of export to Vietnam over GDP that is 1.9% higher. Importantly, we nd low-skilled migrants to be as instrumental as the high-skilled in fostering trade.

Jacks et al. (2011) offer an alternative to price gaps to quantify trade costs. Implementing a method which consists in deducing international trade costs from trade flows, they argue that the reduction in trade costs was the main driving force of trade growth during the first globalization (1870-1913), whereas economic expansion was the main driving force during the second globalization (1950-2000). We argue that this important result is driven by the use of an ad hoc aggregation method. What Jacks et al. (2011) capture is the difference in the relative starting trade of dyads experiencing faster trade growth in the first and second globalization. More generally, we cast doubts on the possibility to reach conclusions of such nature with a method that infers trade costs from trade flows, and then uses these costs to explain trade flows. We argue that it can only rephrase the information already contained in openness ratios.

In this paper we investigate how rms adjust markups across products in response to uctuations in the real exchange rate. In a theoretical framework, we show that rms increase their markups and producer prices following a real depreciation and that this increase is greater for products with higher productivity, a consequence of local distribution costs. We estimate markups at the market-product-plant level using detailed panel production and cost data from Mexican manufacturing between 1994 and 2007. Exploiting variation in the real exchange rate in the aftermath of the peso crisis in December 1994, we provide robust empirical evidence that plants increase their markups and producer prices in response to a real depreciation and that within-rm heterogeneity is a key determinant of plants’ response to exchange rate shocks. Our model and empirical methodology allow us to decompose the producer price response to exchange rate shocks into a markup and a marginal cost component using our markup estimates.

China’s policy-makers argued that WTO accession and the accompanying trade liberalization would have a beneficial impact on the domestic economy. China’s import tariffs differed tremendously across industry in the earlier years, but converged to an almost uniform low level after WTO entry. We exploit sectoral variation in the extent of tariff reduction to identify the impact of increased import competition on firm performance and its contribution to the significant productivity growth over the 1995–2007 period. We find evidence of strong downward pressure on prices and mark-ups, but limited evidence that imports took away market share from domestic firms. Furthermore, much of the effects on sectoral productivity come from changes at the extensive margin. Sectors that liberalized most tend to attract especially productive entrants, private firms in particular, which can be rationalized by an increase in the minimum productivity threshold needed to survive in these sectors.

In the Belle Époque, Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom, but growth in output per capita was lackluster. We seek to reconcile this ostensible paradox. Because of the sharp decline in both fixed and variable trade costs, the trade boom was as much about the expansion in the number of products delivered and markets served as it was about shipping more of the same old products. We use a new highly disaggregated data set on bilateral exports at the product level to illustrate these claims. In line with new trade theory, the effect of trade on productivity was mediated by sector-level firm heterogeneity and product differentiation. In new technology sectors, like tramways, the high degree of firm heterogeneity amplified the effect of trade on productivity. But in other sectors, mainly old staple industries like cotton textiles, a high level of firm uniformity muted the effect of trade. Into the twentieth century, old staples trumped new technology sectors, per capita income growing modestly as a result.

This paper shows that how firms export (directly or indirectly via intermediaries) matters. We develop and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model that allows learning-by-exporting on the cost and demand side as well as sunk/fixed costs to differ by export mode. We find that demand and productivity evolve more favorably under direct exporting, though the fixed/sunk costs of this option are higher. Our results suggest that had China not liberalized its direct trading rights when it joined the WTO, its exports and export participation would have been 26 and 33% lower respectively.

This article explores the determinants of changes to the range of exports at the firm level with a focus on the role played by the firm’s local environment. It extends the model developed by Bernard et al. (2010) to a multiregional setting to account for localized externalities. The model is tested using French micro-data on monoregional manufacturing firms covering the period 2002–2007. Our main finding is that the local product space has an impact on exporters’ product-market entry and exit decisions. Firms tend to modify their exported product mix to achieve congruence with the core products of the locality. Also, firms receive higher revenue from the export of products that are more related to the core capabilities of the locality.

In this paper, we document the presence of “technology-induced” trade in France between 1997 and 2007 and assess its impact on consumer welfare. We use the staggered roll-out of broadband internet to estimate its causal effect on the importing behavior of affected firms. Using an event-study design, we find that broadband expansion increases firm-level imports by around 25%. We further find that the “sub-extensive” margin (number of products and sourcing countries per firm) is the main channel of adjustment and that the effect is larger for capital goods. Finally, we develop a model where firms optimize over their import strategy and which yields a sufficient statistics formula for the quantification of the effects of broadband on consumer welfare. Interpreted within this model, our reduced-form estimates imply that broadband internet reduced the consumer price index by 1.7% and that the import-channel, i.e. the enhanced access to foreign goods that is allowed by broadband, accounts for a quarter of that effect.

Selling internationally requires products that resonate with an international customer base and therefore an approach to markets that is in keeping with diverse cultures (i.e., relational capital). As emphasized by international business studies, this relational capital is in turn related to the successful teaming of a diverse workforce, as this process teaches employees to operate in multicultural environments. This knowledge becomes like an intangible asset to which firms can resort, also when engaging in international transactions. We explore this channel empirically, investigating the impact of workforce diversity on firms' exporting performances and find that ethnic diversity further justifies firms' different presence in international markets. Since hiring is not a random practice, and firms ultimately select into ethnically different labor forces, we exploit the EU enlargement of 2004 to instrument for the diversity of the pool of workers locally recruitable. Because migrants tend to settle where the attitude toward them is most favorable, we use the median voter's political ideology at firm's location to measure the hostility at time of settlement. This gives our instrument spatial variation besides time variation.

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winners from growing Chinese demand for commodities. Using census data for Brazil, we find that local labour markets more affected by Chinese import competition experienced slower growth in manufacturing wages and in-migration rates between 2000 and 2010, and greater rises in local wage inequality. However, in locations benefiting from rising Chinese demand, we observe higher wage growth, lower takeup of cash transfers and positive effects on job quality.

Relational contracts – informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships – are integral parts of global production processes. This paper develops a repeated-game model of global sourcing in which final good producers decide whether to engage with their suppliers in relational contracting and whether to integrate a supplier into a firm's boundaries or deal with the latter at arm's-length. The model predicts that the relative prevalence of vertical integration increases in the long-term orientation of the headquarters' and suppliers' managers. It further suggests that the share of a foreign subsidiary owned by a final good producer increases in the headquarters' long-term orientation. Combining industry-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Related Party Trade database with measures for long-term orientation from Hofstede et al. (2010) and the World Management Survey, I find empirical evidence supportive of the positive link between the long-term orientation of cooperation parties and the relative prevalence of vertical integration. Using information on managerial composition of firms and ownership stakes from the Bureau van Dijk's Orbis database, I find that firms led by long-term oriented managers own higher shares of their foreign subsidiaries.

This paper examines the implications of the European Union (EU) regional trade preferences for processed food trade between Greece and its EU partners, and between Greece and non-EU countries. The empirical analysis relies on the gravity model, and uses different estimation techniques. The results show that the EU regional trade preferences led to substantial increases in processed food trade between Greece and its EU partners, emphasizing trade creation effects. The magnitudes of these increases are higher than the intra-EU average, and are more pronounced for Greece's imports than for Greece's exports. The results also indicate that the EU regional trade preferences brought about decreases in processed food trade between Greece and non-EU countries, implying trade diversion effects. The Greek food processing industry could benefit from competitiveness-promoting strategies (e.g., upgrading innovation activities, marketing and distribution channels, and production efficiency) to expand exports to the EU market and to counter import competition in the domestic market. JEL Classification: F13, F14, F15.

Over recent decades, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has advanced a policy of regional integration, starting with the ASEAN Free Trade Area, followed by the ASEAN+1 free trade agreements with its six main trading partners, and now with ASEAN+6. For ASEAN to further advance regional integration in the East Asian context, it should continue to focus on trade in goods, investment, and services, to smooth out the process of trade creation and investment realisation. East Asian integration is designed not to be just an ‘extensive regional trade agreement’, but more a ‘responsive vehicle’ that consists of trade and investment commitments combined with facilitation, to improve the effectiveness of the implementation of trade and investment agreements and the liberalisation agenda for all members. To keep regional integration viable, it should adopt an open regionalism policy.

This paper investigates the heterogeneous response of exporters to real exchange rate fluctuations due to product quality. We model theoretically the effects of real exchange rate changes on the optimal price and quantity responses of firms that export multiple products with heterogeneous levels of quality. The model shows that the elasticity of demand perceived by exporters decreases with a real depreciation and with quality, leading to more pricing-to-market and to a smaller response of export volumes to a real depreciation for higher quality goods. We test empirically the predictions of the model by combining a unique data set of highly disaggregated Argentinean firm-level wine export values and volumes between 2002 and 2009 with experts wine ratings as a measure of quality. In response to a real depreciation, we find that firms significantly increase more their markups and less their export volumes for higher quality products, but only when exporting to high income destination countries. These findings remain robust to different measures of quality, samples, specifications, and to the potential endogeneity of quality.

The objective of this article is to reappraise both the accuracy of the official export statistics and the narrative of Brazilian export growth during the period immediately following independence. We undertake an accuracy test of the official values of Brazilian export statistics and find evidence of considerable under-valuation. Once corrected, during the post-independence decades (1821–50) Brazil's current exports represented a larger share of its economy and its constant growth is found to be more dynamic than any other period of the nineteenth century. We posit that this dynamism was related to an exogenous institutional shock in the form of British West Indies slave emancipation that afforded Brazil a competitive advantage. El objetivo de este artículo es reconsiderar tanto la exactitud de las estadísticas oficiales de exportación y la narrativa del crecimiento de exportaciones de Brasil durante el período inmediatamente posterior a la independencia. Aquí se realiza un examen sobre la exactitud de los valores oficiales de las estadísticas sobre la exportaciones brasileñas y encontramos evidencias de una subvaloración considerable. Una vez corregidas, durante las décadas post independentistas (1821–1850), las exportaciones de Brasil representan una parte mayor de su economía y demostramos que su constante crecimiento resultó ser más dinámico que en cualquier otro periodo de ese siglo. Sostenemos que dicho dinamismo se relacionó con un choque institucional externo en la forma de la emancipación de esclavos de las colonias británicas en el Caribe que dio a Brasil una ventaja competitiva. O objetivo deste artigo é reavaliar tanto a precisão das estatísticas oficiais relacionadas às exportações quanto as narrativas sobre o crescimento das exportações brasileiras no período logo após a independência. Realizamos um teste de precisão dos valores das estatísticas oficiais de exportações brasileiras e encontramos evidências de uma considerável subvalorizarão. Uma vez feitas as correções, durante as décadas pós-independência (1821–1850) as exportações brasileiras representaram uma parcela maior da economia do país e o crescimento constante das exportações demonstra ter sido mais dinâmico que em qualquer outro período do século XIX. Postulamos que este dinamismo estava relacionado ao choque institucional exógeno representado pela abolição da escravidão nas Índias Ocidentais britânicas que garantiram uma vantagem competitiva ao Brasil. Antonio Tena-Junguito acknowledges financial support from MCI:ECO2011-25713 and both authors from MCI:ECO2015-00209

This paper examines the trade and trade-induced welfare effects of oil prices. Using a gravity model of trade, the paper finds that the distance elasticity of trade significantly increases with the oil price. This suggests that high oil prices make trade less global, as they affect longer shipping routes more. The paper estimates that an increase in the oil price from $100 to $200 (in 2014 US$) would have similar trade effects as an import tariff around 17 percent for two countries 10,000 km away. This is akin to a 55 percent increase in shipping distance. This trade reduction would lower welfare by 0.03 percent in the average non-oil-exporting country.

We develop and structurally estimate a model of heterogeneous multiproduct firms that can be used to decompose the firm-size distribution into the contributions of costs, “appeal” (quality or taste), markups, and product scope. Using Nielsen barcode data on prices and sales, we find that variation in firm appeal and product scope explains at least four fifths of the variation in firm sales. We show that the imperfect substitutability of products within firms, and the fact that larger firms supply more products than smaller firms, implies that standard productivity measures are highly dependent on implicit demand system assumptions and probably dramatically understate the relative productivity of the largest firms. Although most firms are well approximated by the monopolistic competition benchmark of constant markups, we find that the largest firms that account for most of aggregate sales depart substantially from this benchmark, and exhibit both variable markups and substantial cannibalization effects.

In the first decade of this millennium, rising food prices returned as a concern for policy makers, especially in developing economies. This paper examines how supply shocks, both domestic and foreign, impacted imports and consumption in the world rice market between 1960 and 2010. Such an investigation is important in assessing the role of trade in compensating for domestic shocks. If shortages lead economies to impose trade restrictions, then trade may not be allowed to play an important role in stabilizing consumption. The existing literature has highlighted the importance of these policy shocks in the world rice market and how they have worked to increase the volatility of prices and trade flows. Although trade cannot be expected to play a strong role when the major producing and consuming economies are simultaneously hit by negative yield shocks, such a scenario has occurred in only about 3% of all observed cases. We also find that consumption fails to stabilize even when domestic shocks are negative and foreign shocks are positive; however, imports do peak. Thus, while trade does help in coping with domestic risks, it is unable to achieve full risk sharing. Therefore, no matter the nature of foreign shocks, the principal concern is to stabilize consumption when an economy is hit by negative domestic yield shocks. The frequency of such shocks is about 12% in all observed cases, highlighting the importance of domestic responses. We find that domestic rice stocks have been important in stabilizing consumption. The reliance on domestic policies has, in turn, kept the rice market thin.

This paper provides a direct test of how fixed export costs and productivity jointly determine firm-level export behavior. Using Chilean data, we construct indices of fixed export costs for each industry-region-year triplet and match them to domestic firms. Our empirical results show that firms facing higher fixed export costs are less likely to export, while those with higher productivity export more. These outcomes are the foundation of the widely-used sorting mechanism in the trade models with firm heterogeneity. A particular and novel finding is that high-productivity nonexporters face greater fixed export costs than low-productivity exporters. We also find that the substitution between fixed export costs and productivity in determining export decisions is weaker for firms with higher productivity. Finally, both larger fixed export costs and greater within-triplet productivity dispersion raise the export volume of the average exporter.

Financement et commerce international : une revue de la litterature Ce papier propose une revue de la litterature consacree aux liens entre financement et commerce international. Nous montrons tout d’abord que les firmes et les secteurs les plus fragiles financierement exportent moins que les autres. De meme, un developpement financier insuffisant et la survenance de crises financieres reduisent d’autant plus les exportations que l’entreprise ou le secteur depend fortement du financement externe. Ensuite, les outils de financement du commerce international, tels que les lettres de credit ou l’assurance-credit export, constituent un puissant canal de transmission des chocs financiers au commerce international. Enfin, nous insistons sur la complexite des liens entre finance et commerce international. D’une part, la causalite entre les deux spheres est en fait reciproque. D’autre part, il existe des interactions institutionnelles entre les reformes financieres et les politiques commerciales.

This paper analyzes the impact of Chinese competition on developed countries export prices, with a focus on Italy. After a theoretical discussion of the channels affecting export prices in presence of competitors from low income countries, we estimate the pricing behavior of two major manufacturing sectors, consumer goods and machinery, distinguishing destination markets according to their income level. Results show that export competition from China has affected Italian price strategies over the period 2000-08, in an idiosyncratic way according to the income level of importers, sector and technology level of products exported. Contrary to what observed for other high-income countries, we find that Italy has followed a very specific strategy to face Chinese competition. Instead of changing “between sector”, moving up to the technology ladder, Italy has kept its specialization in traditional sectors and has upgraded the quality of its low-tech and labor-intensive products, when in direct competition with Chinese ones. For higher technology products, on the other hand, it has adjusted prices downward to reduce Chinese competitive pressure, especially in segments where it does not hold a comparative advantage, while it has fostered differentiation only for some niche products within the sectors with higher specialization.

Poor domestic transportation infrastructure in developing countries is often cited as an important impediment for accessing international markets. Yet, evidence on how transportation infrastructure improvements affect the volume and composition of exports is scarce. Drawing on the large-scale public investment in expressways undertaken in Turkey during the 2000s, this paper contributes to our understanding of how internal trade costs affect regional exports and specialization. Two results emerge. First, we estimate that this road infrastructure project accounts for 15 percent of the export increase from interior regions, generating a 10-year discounted stream of additional export revenues that amount to between 9 and 14 percent of the value of the investment. Second, while the exports of all industries within a given region increase in response to improvements in connectivity to the international gateways of the country, the magnitude of this increase is larger the more time sensitive an industry is. Accordingly, we also observe an increase in the regional employment and revenue shares of such industries. Our results support the hypothesis that internal trade costs can be a determinant of international specialization and comparative advantage.

We investigate the role that labor costs hold in exporters’ performance. To do so, we exploit a large-scale French reform that granted most firms a tax credit proportional to the wagebill of their employees paid below a given threshold. This policy effectively translated into a cut in labor cost whose magnitude varies depending on firm-specific wage structures. We use the predicted treatment intensity based on pre-reform composition of the labor force as an instrument for the actual policy-induced firm-level change in labor costs. Although our point estimates are consistent with commonly estimated firm-level trade elasticities combined with reasonable labor shares in total costs, coefficients are found to be very noisy, suggesting lack of robust evidence of a causal effect of the policy. We discuss several potential explanations for our results as well as their implications.

У статті розглядається сучасний стан експортної діяльності малих і середніх підприємств в Україні. Окреслено основні втрати експортного потенціалу, яких зазнала економіка України внаслідок зовнішньої агресії. Наведено основні показники, які характеризують рівень експортної діяльності малих і середніх підприємств. До чинників, що обмежують можливості малих і середніх підприємств брати участь у зовнішній торгівлі віднесено: ускладнені вимоги щодо отримання регуляторних умов при здійсненні експортних операцій, відсутність високих стандартів проведення митних процедур, обмежений доступ до інформації про ситуацію на зовнішніх ринках, низька результативність існуючої системи сприяння налагодженню контактів з потенційними зарубіжними партнерами, низький кваліфікаційний рівень менеджменту малих і середніх компаній в питаннях управління зовнішньоекономічною діяльністю, відсутність вичерпно регламентованих механізмів застосування процедур і регуляторних вимог при здійсненні зовнішньоторговельних операцій, низький рівень доступності експортного кредитування, недостатня результативність державних програм підтримки експорту, наявність мовних і культурних бар'єрів. На основі визначення специфіки та проявів перешкод для експортної діяльності малих і середніх підприємств запропоновано низку заходів державної політики, призначених для створення умов для поступового нарощування експортного потенціалу малих і середніх підприємств і посилення позицій країни на зовнішніх ринках. Ці заходи мають бути спрямовані на спрощення процедур і регуляторних вимог для зниження транзакційних витрат компаній на здійснення експортної діяльності, розбудову механізмів інформаційної, правової та методичної підтримки експортерів, активізацію фінансової підтримки експортної діяльності. Рекомендації щодо розвитку експортного потенціалу малих і середніх підприємств в Україні можуть бути використані у діяльності центральних органів державної влади, при розробці національних та галузевих програм розвитку. The article deals with the current state of export activity of small and medium-sized enterprises in Ukraine. The main losses of export potential suffered by Ukrainian economy because of external aggression are determined. The main indicators characterizing the level of export activity of small and medium-sized enterprises are given. The factors limiting the ability of small and medium-sized enterprises to participate in foreign trade and their greater vulnerability to the impact of foreign trade barriers are identified. The factors, that limit the opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises to participate in foreign trade are as follows: complicated requirements for obtaining regulatory conditions for export operations, a lack of high standards of customs procedures, limited access to information on the situation on foreign markets, low effectiveness of the system for facilitating contacts with potential foreign partners, under-qualified management of small and medium companies, a lack of exhaustively regulated mechanisms of application procedures and regulatory requirements in carrying out trade transactions, poor availability of export credit, lack of effectiveness of government programs to support exports, language and cultural barriers. Based on the defined specifics and manifestations of obstacles to the export activities of small and medium-sized enterprises, several public policy measures for the gradual increase of the export potential of small and medium-sized enterprises and strengthening the country's positions in foreign markets are proposed. These measures should be aimed at simplifying the procedures and regulatory requirements that provide the reduction of transaction costs for companies export activities, developing mechanisms for information, legal and methodological support for exporters, enhancing financial support for export activities. Recommendations on the development of export potential of small and medium enterprises in Ukraine can be used by central government bodies, in elaboration of national and sectoral development programs.

This paper measures the impact of low-cost transport by rail in Malawi on the dispersion of agricultural commodities prices across markets by exploiting the quasi-experimental design of the nearly total collapse of domestic transport by rail in January 2003 due to the destruction of a railway bridge at Rivirivi, Balaka. Estimations are based on monthly market prices of four agricultural commodities (maize, groundnuts, rice, and beans) in 27 local markets for the period 1998–2006. Market pairs connected by rail when the railway line was operational are intervention observations. Railway transport services explain a 14 percent to 17 percent reduction in price dispersion across markets. Geographical reach of trade varies by crop, most likely related to storability and geographical spread of production. Perishability appears to increase impact reflecting limited scope for arbitrage. Overall, impacts are remarkably similar in size across commodities.

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries, and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to infer border barriers flexibly are often missing for services, this paper derives a novel methodology for projecting output data. The empirical implementation sheds light on the role of institutions, geography, size, and digital infrastructure as determinants of border barriers. The paper finds that border barriers have generally fallen over time, but there are differences across sectors and countries. Notably, border effects for the smallest economies have remained stable, giving rise to a divergent pattern across countries.

The paper investigates the impact of import competition on rent-sharing between firms and employees. First, by applying recent advances in the estimation of price-costs margins to a large panel of French manufacturing firms for the period 1993–2007,we are able to classify each firm into labor- and product-market regimes based on the presence/absence of market power. Second, we concentrate on firms that operate in an efficient bargaining framework to study the effect of import penetration on workers’ bargaining power. We find that French imports from other OECD countries have a negative effect on bargaining power, whereas the impact of imports from low wage countries is more muted. By providing firm-level evidence on the relationship between international trade and rent sharing, the paper sheds new light on the effect of trade liberalization on the labor market.

Over the last 20 years the trade literature repeatedly documented the trade-reducing effects of inter- and intra-national borders. Thereby, the puzzling size and persistence of observed border effects from the beginning raised doubts on the role of underlying political borders. However, when observed border effects are not caused by political trade barriers, why should their spatial dimension then inevitably coincide with the geography of present or past political borders? This paper identifies a "border effect" in the absence of a border. Thereby, the finding that trade between East- and West-Japan is 23.1% - 51.3% lower than trade within both country parts, is established in the absence of an obvious east-west division due to historical borders, cultural differences or past civil wars. From a rich set of explanatory variables post-war agglomeration processes, reflected by the contemporaneous structure of Japan's business and social networks, rather than cultural differences, shaped by long-lasting historical shocks, are identified as an explanation for the east-west bias in intra-Japanese trade.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore two dimensions of the firm hierarchy of international market-specific linkages, using data on Swedish manufacturing firms from 1997 to 2007. First, we investigate the productivity ordering with respect to three international linkages; importing, exporting and investing abroad. Second, we explore whether differences in the productivity ordering across industries correlates with industry and country characteristics. Our findings support a general productivity hierarchy from importing to exporting and from exporting to investing abroad, as well as from a low to a high number of linkages (measuring the complexity of firms’ international linkages). However, an industry-by-industry examination shows that the hierarchical structure is only generally upheld when it comes to the number of international linkages, while the ordering of import, export and investment linkages does not exhibit the same regularity across industries. Extending the analysis, we find that the lack of a hierarchical structure is more likely in industries focusing on larger and less distant markets.

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different products than manufacturing exporters do. Wholesalers are more prevalent in markets with higher destination-specific fixed costs and focus on products that are less differentiated, have lower contract intensity, and have large sunk entry costs. Aggregate exports to destinations with high shares of indirect exports are less responsive to changes in the real exchange rate than are exports to markets served primarily by direct exporters.

We study product-level data for Taiwanese manufacturing establishments through the lens of a model with endogenously variable markups. We nd that the gains from international trade can be large: in our benchmark model, moving from autarky to a 10% import share implies an increase in welfare equivalent to a 27% permanent increase in consumption. By contrast, a standard trade model with constant markups implies a smaller gain, around a 4% increase in consumption. By increasing competition, trade reduces markups and so reduces distortions in labor and investment choices. Greater competition also induces a more ecient allocation of factors of production across establishments, thereby directly raising TFP. These channels are an order of magnitude more important than the love-of-variety eects in standard trade models. Our model predicts that industries that are more open are characterized by lower revenue productivity and lower dispersion in revenue productivity across producers. We nd strong support for these predictions of the model in the Taiwanese data. In our model, micro details such as as the dispersion of industry-level import shares determine how the Armington elasticity endogenously responds to a change in trade policy. Consequently, these micro details also matter for determining the size of the gains from standard love-of-variety eects.

How are the dynamics of foreign and domestic sales correlated at the firm level? The question is relevant in that the sign of the correlation shapes the international transmission of shocks and the effects of policy measures. From a theoretical perspective, the correlation could be either zero, as assumed by standard international trade models, or negative if firms are capacity constrained, or positive if liquidity constraints dominate. The empirical evidence, however, is rather mixed. Using a sample of Italian manufacturing firms in the period 2001-12, we show that: i) the sign of the correlation changes over the business cycle, being negative in the first part of the past decade and positive after the 2008 crisis; ii) all the channels suggested by the literature are involved and they may explain the time-varying correlation; iii) the drop in domestic sales by Italian firms in 2012, contributed negatively to firms’ exports, and together with liquidity constraints, the fall reduced the growth rate of exports by an average of 0.6 percentage points.

Calibrating a stylized version of the Dornbusch-Fischer-Samuelson model, this paper finds that relative to a cohort of 97 trading partners, the US capital stock, labor force, and nominal GDP per capita decreased, while the level of technology embodied in its output increased. These observed dynamics suggest a shift in comparative advantage that, coupled with increased production at the extensive and intensive margins, yields an expectation of labor market churning. Grouping trading partners by World Bank income classifications reveals that observed changes for low and lower middle income cohorts resulted in more pronounced shifts in comparative advantage. Examining employment and earnings in US manufacturing industries, a dynamic regression model reveals that increased import penetration has significant negative effects on production worker employment and wages, while increases in exports has significant positive effects on production worker employment. Variation in labor market outcomes is found across income classifications, as well as industries categorized by trade orientation.

Following Nocke(2012), we develop a model to explain how firms allocate their organizational capital to different products. Using the Chinese export and tax rebate data, we find that the reduction of export tax rebate causes contraction of product scope , and the less competitive products are more likely to be dropped.

This study examines the marginal effects of traditional determinants of exports and imports with a focus on the role of price competitiveness in restoring external balances in the euro area. It is a first attempt to compare marginal effects of various harmonised competitiveness indicators (HCIs) on both exports and imports of both goods and services across individual euro area countries. We find evidence that HCIs based on broader cost and price measures have a larger marginal effect (with some exceptions) on exports of goods. Exports of services are sensitive to HCIs in big euro area countries and Slovakia, where exports of services are also found more sensitive to competitiveness indicators based on broader price measures. Imports of goods and imports of services are quite insensitive to changes in relative prices. Finally, in some cases measures of fit indicate that a large unexplained residual part is present, implying that other non-price related factors might play an important role in driving foreign trade and policies aimed at enhancing the quality of goods traded are warranted.