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 studies the impact of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 on Japanese exports, focusing on international production networks in machinery sectors. For our survival analysis, we estimate a Cox proportional hazards model. Consequently, we find that Japanese exports to Asian countries,...

International business-cycle models assume that home and foreign goods are poor substitutes. International trade models assume they are close substitutes. This paper constructs a model where this discrepancy is due to frictions in distribution. Imports need to be combined with a local non-traded...

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 the impact of trade and investment liberalization on the wage skill premium between skilled and unskilled workers in Vietnamese manufacturing. The result from an econometric analysis using a firm-level dataset reveals the important role of trade liberalization as an impetus...

This paper examines the implications of Nepal’s exchange rate policy for its export performance over the period 1980–2010. We first document Nepal’s long-standing currency peg against the Indian rupee and that Nepal’s real exchange rate appreciated substantially from the late 1990s. We...

Indonesia experienced growing shortfalls of food supplies during the 1950s and during the 1960s and 1970s it imported increasing amounts of rice, wheat and wheat flour. This paper investigates the role of food aid in this development. In the 1950s,Indonesia received some US PL480 food aid under...

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...