This paper investigates the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the volume and variability of trade flows. Employing a signal extraction framework, we show that the direction and magnitude of importers' and exporters' optimal trading activities depend upon the source of the uncertainty...

In this paper, we empirically investigate the impact of exchange rate volatility on real international trade flows utilizing a 13-country dataset of monthly bilateral real exports for 1980--1998. We compute one-month-ahead exchange rate volatility from the intra--monthly variations in the...

We present an empirical investigation of the hypotheses that exchange rate volatility may have an impact on both the volume and variability of trade flows by considering a broad set of industrial countries' bilateral real trade flows over the period 1980-1998. Similar to the findings of earlier...

This paper investigates the effects of permanent and transitory components of the exchange rate on firms' profitability under imperfect information. Utilizing a signal extraction framework, we show that the variances of these components of the exchange rate process will have indeterminate...

This paper provides a direct test of how fixed export costs and productivity jointly determine firm-level export behavior. Using Chilean data, we construct indices of fixed export costs for each industry-region-year triplet and match them to domestic firms. Our empirical results show that firms...

All countries would agree to immediate global free trade if countries were compensated for any terms-of-trade losses with transfers from countries whose terms-of-trade improve, and if customs unions were required to have no effects on non-member countries. Global free trade with transfers is in...

We propose a decomposition of social welfare when consumers' preferences are described by quasi-linear utility functions. In our decomposition, social welfare is expressed as the sum of consumers' gross utilities and trade surplus of non-numeraire goods, whose consumption enters utility...

The high trade costs inferred from gravity are rarely used in the wide class of trade models. Two related problems explain this omission of a key explanatory variable. First, national seller and buyer responses to trade costs depend on their incidence rather than on the full cost. Second, the...

The trade restrictiveness index is the uniform trade tax factor which is equivalent in trade restrictiveness to the actual structure of domestic taxes subsidies. Its application to Mexican agricultural policy from 1985 to 1990 reveals an increase in restrictiveness. To return to the trade...

There isn't nearly as much trade as standard models suggest there should be. Formal trade barriers and transport costs are too low to account for the difference. The pattern of missing trade has interesting variation across country pairs. These clues suggest the need for theoretical and...