From 1997 to 2006, US state governors led more than 500 trade missions to foreign countries. Trade missions are potentially a form of public investment in export promotion. I create a theory of public investment by introducing government to a Melitz (2003)–Chaney (2008) model. Controlling for...

Forty US states operated an overseas office in 2002. Treating overseas offices as sales offices, the model assumes offices facilitate exports by reducing the transaction cost of selling abroad. From theory, states operate an office if aggregate savings outweigh operating costs. Exploiting the...

Deardorff's (2004) broad definition of technology in Ricardian trade models is useful for extending the explanatory power of comparative advantage to account for a fact on firm level exporter clustering unexplained under the standard definition.

Because of more restrictive assumptions on regional input-output (IO) models compared to computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, IO results are thought to be consistent with long-run equilibrium but otherwise overestimated. We compare IO and CGE models' response to a shock to Washington...

The Ellison and Glaeser (1997) index is an unbiased statistic of industrial localization. Though the expected value of the index is known, ad hoc thresholds are used to interpret the extent of localization. We improve the interpretation of the index by simulating confidence intervals that a...