Recently a small and growing empirical literature has attempted to analyze the role that quality plays in our understanding of trade. In particular, the recent work of Khandelwal (2010) has brought the insights of structural IO models of demand to bear into trade data. Our work builds on this...

We study how the 2004 reform of minimum wage rules in China has affected the survival, average wage, employment and productivity of local firms. To identify the causal effect of minimum wage growth, we use firm-level data for more than 160,000 manufacturing firms active in 2003 and complement...

In this paper, we estimate firm-level markups and test some micro-level predictions of a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous markups. Our theoretical framework is an extended version of the Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) (MO) model that features both quality and...

This paper provides evidence that learning about demand is an important driver of firms' dynamics. We present a simple model with Bayesian learning in which firms are uncertain about their idiosyncratic demand parameter in each of the markets they serve, and update their beliefs as noisy...

In this paper, we study how firm-level export performance is affected by Real Exchange Rate (RER) volatility and investigate the way this effect is shaped by firm size and more specifically, the number of destinations. Our empirical analysis relies on a French firm-level database that combines...

This paper examines implications of the terms-of-trade theory for the determinants of outcomes arising under the enforcement provisions of international agreements. Like original trade agreement negotiations, we model formal trade dispute negotiations as potentially addressing the terms-of-trade...

The impact of protection on economic growth is one of the traditional issues in economic history, which has enjoyed a revival in recent times, with the publication of a number of comparative quantitative papers. They all share a common weakness: they measure protection with the ratio of custom...

This paper examines the importance of buyer-supplier relationships, geography and the structure of the production network in firm performance. We develop a simple model where firms can outsource tasks and search for suppliers in different locations. Low search and outsourcing costs lead firms to...

This work investigates the motivations behind the Chinese fiscal policy on exports. It relies on very detailed product level (HS 6 digit) data over the period 2002-12 covering both export tax and export VAT rebate. It aims to uncover the respective importance of the various policy motivations...

An influential literature has documented large differences across countries and industries in terms of product quality. It is important to understand the determinants of these differences, because the production of high-quality goods influences key aspects of economic performance. In this paper,...