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 analyses and quantifies the effects of trade liberalisation and skill-biased technical change, both exogenous and trade-induced, on the skill premium and real wages of unskilled and skilled workers in the Mexican manufacturing sector, using industry- and firm-level data for 1984-1990...

The causes of the USA's exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India.  Habakkuk's views on the causes of American industrial pre-eminence are reassessed.  While the USA had abundant natural...

We provide cogent evidence for the causal pro-trade effect of migrants and in doing so establish an important link between migrant networks and long-run economic development.  To this end, we exploit a unique event in human history, the exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People to the US.  This...

We show that the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy trade significantly more with one another in the aftermath of the collapse of the Iron Curtain than predicted by a standard gravity model.  This trade surplus declines linearly and monotonically over time.  We argue that these...

While political instability is broadly believed to be bad for economic growth, firm performance and foreign direct investment, few studies convincingly identify the causal impact of conflict on firms and export performance.  In this paper, we analyze the impact of the Kenyan post-election...

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 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...