The computable general equilibrium models used in the literature tend to be a bit of a black box. This paper provides some intuition behind what goes on in these black boxes by laying out a simple general equilibrium model and intuitively explaining what lies behind the demand for emissions. It...

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...

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 considers the effects of trade policy--tariffs and quotas--when importing is done by competitive traders who are identical ex ante but differ ex post. We show that the standard equivalence results no longer hold and the conventional ranking of tariffs and quotas is turned on its head:...

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...

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....

Motivated by evidence on the importance of incomplete information and networks in international trade, we investigate the supply of 'network intermediation.' We hypothesize that the agents who become international trade intermediaries first accumulate networks of foreign contacts while working...

This paper looks at the patterns of causation between income, export, import, and investment growth for 25 developing countries. Our approach differs from previous efforts in a number of ways. First, we examine each country individually in order to allow for complete heterogeneity and properly...

The view that U.S. businesses are being unfairly hurt by barriers to access in foreign markets has raised demands for market access requirements (MARs) from within U.S. industry and government alike. We show that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the recent literature, MARs can be...