A variety of empirical and theoretical trade papers have suggested and documented a positive impact of trade on the productivity of firms. However, there is less consensus about the underlying mechanism at work. While trade papers focus on access to export markets, other papers stress the...

Using a detailed data set at the tariff line level, we find an emulator effect of multilateralism on subsequent regional trade agreements involving the US. We exploit the variation in the frequency with which the US has granted immediate duty free access (IDA) to its Free Trade Area partners...

We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by destroying protectionist rents, thus making democracies last longer. This...

One third of Chinese exporters sell more than ninety percent of their production abroad. We argue that this distinctive pattern is attributable to a wide range of subsidies that provide incentives to these "pure exporters". We propose a heterogeneous firm model in which firms exporting all their...

In this paper, we provide causal evidence that firms serve new markets which are geographically close to their prior export destinations with a higher probability than standard gravity models predict. We quantify the impact of this spatial pattern using a data set of Chinese firms which had...

This paper shows that the WTO's Article XXIV increases the likelihood of free trade, but may worsen world welfare when free trade is not reached and customs unions (CUs) form. We consider a model of many countries. Article XXIV prevents a CU from raising its common external tariff, which makes...

Median voter theory applied to trade policy predicts positive tariffs in capital-abundant countries and negative tariffs in labor-abundant countries. Negative tariffs are rare, and this paper reconciles the median voter theory with observed protectionism across countries. By considering large...

This paper presents a simple model of subsidies with export share requirements (ESR) in a heterogeneous firm environment. A two-country general equilibrium version of the model with a single 100% ESR is calibrated using firm-level data from the 2002 wave of the Business Environment and...

We use a representative and cross-country comparable sample of manufacturing firms (EFIGE) to document patterns of interaction among firm-level internationalization, innovation and productivity across seven European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom). We...