Uneven development within countries suggests that domestic trade frictions are important. Trade flows within a country, however, are rarely observed. We employ a new dataset on trade between fifteen Chinese treaty ports to examine the importance of domestic frictions around the year 1900. The...

By reducing the negative correlation between local prices and productivity shocks, trade liberalization changes the volatility of returns. In this paper, we explore the second moment effects of trade. Using forty years of agricultural micro-data from India, we show that falling trade costs...

In this paper we derive a new measure of openness--trade potential index--that quantifies potential gains from trade as a simple function of data. Using a standard multicountry trade model, we measure openness by a country's potential welfare gain from moving to a world with frictionless trade....

We develop a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition and trade based on indirectly additive preferences and heterogenous firms. It generates markups independent from destination population but increasing in destination per capita income, as documented empirically. Trade...

In a standard multi-sector, heterogeneous-firm trade model the effect of tariffs on entry, especially in the presence of production linkages, can reverse the traditional positive optimal-tariff argument. We construct and employ a new, large, disaggregated tariff dataset and then apply a...

This paper examines the microstructure of import markets and the division of the gains from trade among consumers, importers and exporters. When exporters and importers transact through anonymous markets, double marginalization and business stealing among competing importers lead to lower...

This study explores the interaction between trade and geography in shaping the Islamic economic doctrine. We build a model where an unequal distribution of land quality in presence of trade opportunities conferred differential gains from trade across regions, fostering predatory behavior by...

Trade in intermediate inputs allows firms to lower their costs of production by using better, cheaper, or novel inputs from abroad. Quantifying the aggregate impact of input trade, however, is challenging. As importing firms differ markedly in how much they buy in foreign markets, results based...

We study the gains from trade liberalization in models with monopolistic competition, firm-level heterogeneity, and variable markups. For a large class of demand functions used in the international macro and trade literature, we derive a parsimonious generalization of the welfare formula in...

Individuals that consume different baskets of goods are differentially affected by relative price changes caused by international trade. We develop a methodology to measure the unequal gains from trade across consumers within countries. The approach requires data on aggregate expenditures and...