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Jel Classification:F1 

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Specialization and the volume of trade: do the data obey the laws?

The core subjects of trade theory are the pattern and volume of trade: which goods are traded by which countries, and how much of those goods are traded. The first part of this paper discusses evidence on comparative advantage, with an emphasis on carefully connecting theoretical models with data analyses. The second part of the paper considers the theoretical foundations of the gravity model and reviews the small number of studies that have tried to test, rather than simply use, the implications of gravity. Both parts of the paper yield the same conclusion: we are still in the very early ...
Staff Reports , Paper 140

Working Paper
No Credit, No Gain: Trade Liberalization Dynamics, Production Inputs, and Financial Development

We study the role of financial development on the aggregate and welfare implications of reducing import tariffs on capital and intermediate inputs. We document that financially underdeveloped economies feature a slower aggregate response following trade liberalization. We set up a quantitative general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms subject to collateral constraints and estimate it to match salient features from Colombian plant-level data. Our model explains a substantial fraction of the differences in the empirical responses of GDP, consumption, and capital across economies with ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-038

Working Paper
No Credit, No Gain: Trade Liberalization Dynamics, Production Inputs, and Financial Development

We study the role of financial development on the aggregate and welfare implications of reducing trade barriers on imports of physical capital and intermediate inputs. We document that financially underdeveloped economies feature a slower response of real GDP, consumption, and investment following trade liberalization episodes that improve access to imported production inputs. To quantify the role of financial development, we set up a quantitative general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms subject to financial constraints and estimate it to match salient features from Colombian ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-038

Working Paper
Non-Gravity Trade

This paper examines the relationship between countries’ bilateral trade with the United States that is not due to gravity (non-gravity trade) and the distribution of income within countries. In countries where only a small share of the population is educated, an increase in non-gravity trade is associated with a significant increase in income inequality. As education of the population increases, the correlation between non-gravity trade and income inequality becomes smaller. Non-gravity trade has no significant effect on income inequality in countries that are world leaders in education.
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 388

Working Paper
International Trade Policy During a Pandemic

This paper studies international trade policy during a pandemic. We consider a multi-sector small open economy model with essential and non-essential goods. Essential goods provide utility relative to a reference consumption level, and a pandemic consists of an increase in this reference level along with higher import and export prices of these goods. The economy produces domestic varieties of both types of goods subject to sectoral adjustment costs, and varieties are traded internationally subject to trade barriers. We find that trade provides limited relief to the increased demand for ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-010

Working Paper
Trade barriers and the relative price tradables

In this paper I quantitatively address the role of trade barriers in explaining why prices of services relative to tradables are positively correlated with levels of development across countries. I argue that trade barriers play a crucial role in shaping the cross-country pattern of specialization across many heterogenous tradable goods. The pattern of specialization feeds into cross-country productivity differences in the tradables sector and is reflected in the relative price of services. I show that the existing pattern of specialization implies that the tradables-sector productivity gap ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 139

Working Paper
Identifying Foreign Suppliers in U.S. Import Data

Relationships between firms and their foreign suppliers are the foundation of international trade, but data limitations and reliability concerns make studying such relationships challenging. We evaluate and enhance supplier information in U.S. import data and present new facts about importer?exporter relationships. Count of foreign exporters from U.S. import data tends to exceed those from source country data, especially from China. The pattern of U.S. imports from origin countries changes substantially by tracing trade back to the supplier's location instead. Related-party relationships ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1142

Working Paper
Self-Fulfilling Debt Crises, Revisited

We revisit self-fulfilling rollover crises by exploring the potential uncertainty introduced by a gap in time (however small) between an auction of new debt and the payment of maturing liabilities. It is well known (Cole and Kehoe, 2000) that the lack of commitment at the time of auction to repayment of imminently maturing debt can generate a run on debt, leading to a failed auction and immediate default. We show that the same lack of commitment leads to a rich set of possible self-fulfilling crises, including a government that issues more debt because of the crisis, albeit at depressed ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-03

Discussion Paper
How Did China’s COVID-19 Shutdown Affect U.S. Supply Chains?

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on trade between the United States and China so far. As workers became sick or were quarantined, factories temporarily closed, disrupting international supply chains. At the same time, the trade relationship between the United States and China has been characterized by rising protectionism and heightened trade policy uncertainty over the last few years. Against this background, this post examines how the recent period of economic disruptions in China has affected U.S. imports and discusses how this episode might impact firms’ supply chains ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20200512

Working Paper
Sourcing substitution and related price index biases

We define a class of bias problems that arise when purchasers shift their expenditures among sellers charging different prices for units of precisely defined and interchangeable product items that are nevertheless regarded as different for the purposes of price measurement. For business-to-business transactions, these shifts can cause sourcing substitution bias in the Producer Price Index (PPI) and the Import Price Index (MPI), as well as potentially in the proposed new true Input Price Index (IPI). Similarly, when consumers shift their expenditures for the same products temporally to take ...
Working Papers , Paper 14-34

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Leibovici, Fernando 21 items

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