This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in U.S. imports using detailed countryproduct data. We create a new measure of product contractibility based on the degree of intermediation in international trade for the product. We find important roles for the interaction of country and...

International trade models typically assume that producers in one country trade directly with final consumers in another. In reality, of course, trade can involve long chains of potentially independent actors who move goods through wholesale and retail distribution networks. These networks...

Recent research in international trade emphasizes the importance of firms' extensive margins for understanding overall patterns of trade as well as how firms respond to specific events such as trade liberalization. In this paper, we use detailed U.S. trade statistics to provide a broad overview...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on firm heterogeneity in international trade. A first wave of empirical findings from micro data on plants and firms proposed challenges for existing models of inter- national trade and inspired the development of new theories emphasizing firm...

This paper examines the role of international trade in the reallocation of U.S. manufacturing activity within and across industries from 1977 to 1997. It introduces a new measure of industry exposure to international trade, motivated by the Heckscher-Ohlin model, which focuses on where imports...

This paper examines the response of industries and firms to changes in trade costs. Several new firm-level models of international trade with heterogeneous firms predict that industry productivity will rise as trade costs fall due to the reallocation of activity across plants within an industry....

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region- industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

This paper develops a model of endogenous product selection by firms. The theory is motivated by new evidence we present on the importance of product switching by U.S. manufacturers. Two-thirds of continuing firms change their product mix every five years, and product switches involve more than...

This paper presents a model of international trade that features heterogeneous firms, relativeendowment differences across countries, and consumer taste for variety. The paper demonstrates thatfirm reactions to trade liberalization generate endogenous Ricardian productivity responses at...