The theory of relationship lending is based on the idea that close ties between borrowers and banks may be economically beneficial. Information asymmetries on the part of the bank introduce adverse selection and moral hazard problems into the lending process and may lead to lengthy decision...

This paper proposes a technique to decompose short-run fluctuations in the terms of trade. Using Ethiopia as an example, we decompose the commodity terms of trade into various components to measure the impact of price and volume shifts as well as export diversification. We use monthly data from...

This study reports results from an empirical investigation of business services sector firms that (start to) export, comparing exporters to firms that serve the national market only. We estimate identically specified empirical models using comparable enterprise level data from France, Germany,...

Quantifying the welfare effects of trade liberalization is a core issue in international trade. Existing frameworks assume perfect labor markets and therefore ignore the effects of aggregate employment changes for welfare. We develop a quantitative trade framework which explicitly models labor...

We investigate the effect of economic integration agreements on the stability of international trade at the 4 digit SITC level. Using annual trade data for over 180 countries from 1962 to 2005 we examine how economic integration agreements affect the length of trade relationships, the volume at...

We use Spanish firm-level data to test the hold-up model of global sourcing proposed by Antr s & Helpman (2004). We propose a novel representation of the model which guides us in bringing the theory to the data. We estimate a discrete choice model of firms' sourcing behavior, separately for the...

This study analyzes the exchange rate pass-through into German import prices based on disaggregated data taken on a monthly basis between 1995 and 2012. Our main contribution is twofold: firstly, we employ various time-series techniques to analyze data for different product categories, and also...

In the 2000s, China's WTO entry constituted a major trade shock. In this paper, we analyze its eff ects on trade and value chains. The fragmentation of the global value chain makes it hard to disentangle who produces for whom. Value added trade contains this information. We build a multi-sector...

A key prediction of a large class of theoretical models is that the location of economic activity is not necessarily determined by fundamentals. To test the empirical relevance of these ideas requires a natural experiment in which a large but ultimately temporary shock dislocates economic...

Earlier work established the notion that international terrorism harms international trade. This evidence was based on annual data with responses in the same year as attacks and incidents and on empirical models which ignored general equilibrium effects. We provide evidence that, if at all,...