Corruption and imperfect contract enforcement dramatically reduce trade. This paper estimates the reduction, using a structural model of import demand in which transactions costs impose a price markup on traded goods. We find that inadequate institutions constrain trade far more than tariffs do....

In this paper we theoretically and empirically model import demand and export supply behavior of firms for the U.S. economy from 1967-1982. A producer theoretic approach based on duality theory is used to derive econometric systems of producer supply and demand functions that are consistent with...

We examine the role of trade policy uncertainty in shaping the import decisions of firms. If the adoption of a new input requires a sunk cost investment, then the prospect of price increases in that input, e.g. due to trade barriers, reduces the adoption of that input (a substitution effect) and...

Recent studies have used import data to assess the impact of foreign varieties on prices and welfare for a home country. The reliance on import data has a number of limitations. First, these papers rely on goods categories defined by the Harmonized System. Second, they define varieties using the...

New goods play a central role in many trade and growth models. We use detailed trade and firm-level data from a large developing economy--India--to investigate the relationship between declines in trade costs, the imports of intermediate inputs and domestic firm product scope. We estimate...

Economists emphasize two channels through which import liberalization affects productivity, one operating between and the other within firms. According to the former, import competition triggers market share reallocations between domestic firms with different technological capabilities...

This paper studies how a rise in China's share of U.S. imports could lower pass-through of exchange rates to U.S. import prices. We develop a theoretical model with variable markups showing that the presence of exports from a country with a fixed exchange rate could alter the competitive...

We examine a generalized version of Flam and Helpman’s (1987) model of vertical differentiation that maps cross-country differences in income distributions to variations in import variety and price distributions. The theoretical predictions are examined and confirmed using micro data on...

This paper studies a simple model of buyer investment and its effect on the variety and vertical structure of international trade. A distinction is made between two types of buyer investment: "flexible" and "specific." Their interactions with the entry and pricing incentives of suppliers are...

In this paper, we show that inequality is an important determinant of import demand, in that it augments the standard gravity model in a significant way. We interpret this result with the aid of a model in which tastes are nonhomothetic. Classification of products, based on the correlation...