We combine data on individual trade transactions from U.S. customs records with comprehensive information on firms' employment from the Census Bureau's business register to examine wholesalers and retailers in U.S. exports and imports. Exporters and importers with 100 percent employment in...

Three sources of gains from trade under monopolistic competition are: (i) new import varieties available to consumers; (ii) enhanced efficiency as more productive firms begin exporting and less productive firms exit; (iii) reduced markups charged by firms due to import competition. The first...

Over the last three decades, the value of Chinese trade has approximately doubled every four years. This rapid growth has transformed the country from a negligible player in world trade to the world's second largest exporter, as well as a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate...

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...

Dooley et al (2003, 2004a,b,c) argue that China seeks to raise urban employment by 10-12 million persons per year, with about 30% of that coming from export growth. In fact, total employment increased by 7.5-8 million per year over 1997-2005. We estimate that export growth over 1997-2002...

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...

Some cultural goods, like clothes and films, are consumed socially and are thus characterized by the same consumption network externalities as languages. At the same time, producers of new cultural goods in any one country draw on the stock of ideas generated by previous cultural production in...

We document a set of bilateral trade data by commodity for 1962-2000, which is available from www.nber.org/data (International Trade Data, NBER-UN world trade data). Users must agree not to resell or distribute the data for 1984-2000. The data are organized by the 4-digit Standard International...

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....

In this paper, we estimate the benefits to countries that purchase goods from China of having access to intermediary services provided by Hong Kong. Traders in Hong Kong supply information on markets and producers in China, which provides welfare gains to foreign firms using these services....