Recent trade models with heterogenous firms have considerable consequences on the interpretation of gravity equations. Chaney (2008) shows that the effect of distance on trade margins incorporates three parameters: the elasticity of substitution between goods, the elasticity of trade costs with...

We consider the impact of low-wage countries’ competition on the quality content of high-wage countries’ exports. We develop a new method that uses firm-level data to measure quality changes in sectoral exports. Over 1995-2005, we measure a 11% increase in the mean quality of France’s...

GeoDist makes available the exhaustive set of gravity variables used in Mayer and Zignago (2005). GeoDist provides several geographical variables, in particular bilateral distances measured using citylevel data to assess the geographic distribution of population inside each nation. We have...

Recent findings in international trade using detailed firm level surveys emphasize the microeconomic effects of trade liberalization episodes. A unilateral trade reform has two opposite effects on firms’ export patterns: (i) expansion of export opportunities for foreign firms exporting to that...

This paper uses micro-data on balance sheets, trade, and the nationality of ownership of firms in France to investigate the effect of foreign multinationals on business cycle comovement. We first show that foreign affiliates, which represent a tiny fraction of all firms, are responsible for a...