International trade has become increasingly dependent on the transmission of complex information, often realized via face-to-face communication. This paper provides novel evidence for the importance of in-person business meetings in international trade. Interactions among trade partners entail a...

While significant work has been done to examine the determinants of regional development, there is little evidence on the contribution of air services toward this outcome. This paper exploits the unexpected market changes induced by the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act to bring new evidence on the...

Communication is a real barrier to organizing international production as it hinders knowledge transmission. This paper provides evidence to suggest that a way in which multinational firms economize on costly information transfers is by using skilled foreign workers, since local talent can...

In the past decade, pirates from Somalia have carried out thousands of attacks on cargo ships sailing through the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, causing what others have identified as significant damage to maritime trade. In this paper, we use variations in the spread and intensity of Somali...

We present and test a model relating a firm's idiosyncratic cost, its exporting status, and the volatilities of its domestic and export sales. In prior models of trade, supply costs for domestic and exports were linear and thus additively separable. We introduce a nonlinear cost function in...

We measure the contribution of firm-specific effects to overall sales variation within a destination and find it remarkably low. Our empirical decomposition is structurally motivated by a heterogeneity model of exporting involving destination-specific, firm-specific, and...

We present and test a model relating a firm's idiosyncratic cost, its exporting status, and the volatilities of its domestic and export sales. In prior models of trade, supply costs for domestic and exports were linear and thus additively separable. We introduce a nonlinear cost function in...

The impact of imports from low-wage countries on domestic labor market outcomes has been a hotly debated issue for decades. The recent surge in imports from China has reignited this debate. Since the 1980s several developed economies have experienced contemporaneous increases in the volume of...