A growing number of studies that look at the relationship between innovation and exports find that more innovation tends to allow firms to export more. But very little is known about the heterogeneous impacts of innovation on exports. Since innovation is not a costless activity, it is important...

Casual evidence suggests that multinational companies increasingly look for places with adequate transport and logistics infrastructure to locate affiliates that participate in cross-border production sharing. Yet, there are no systematic empirical analyses examining how logistics infrastructure...

An increasing number of case studies provide evidence that the interaction between global actors and firms in developing countries, particularly within the context of global supply chains, translate into critical knowledge acquisition. Examining vertically-integrated affiliates located in Chile...

Firms are increasingly participating in global value chains by becoming upstream suppliers of international companies located in their own countries. The available evidence indicates that becoming a successful supplier of these companies entail attaining capabilities that are typically above the...

Most microeconometric studies available for LAC have focused on measuring the direct impact of trade on plant productivity leaving aside other effects that arise through the market selection process. Additionally, most studies have focused on tariff barriers as the only obstacle to international...

This paper explores the dynamics of convergence in Latin American countries and asks whether there are tendencies for converging to different clubs. The analysis shows clear differences between two groups: a large group of low-to-middle income countries and a small group of rich ountries. The...

An increasing body of evidence indicates that an important share of aggregate productivity growth, in both developed and developing countries, arises from the reallocation of resources across plants of different productivity levels. New trade models with heterogeneous firms (Bernard et al., 2003;...

We investigate whether greater microeconomic flexibility facilitates the process of creative destruction in the context of new trade models with heterogeneous firms (Bernard et al., 2003 and Melitz, 2003). In these models, freer trade increases aggregate productivity because high-efficiency...

The literature examining the effects of domestic transport costs on trade flows is scarce. The few studies available rely mostly on distance-based measures as proxies of transport costs which impede analyzing the trade impacts of transport-infrastructure improvements, a critical aspect in...

Recent trade models with heterogeneous firms (Bernard et al., 2003 and Melitz, 2003) show how lower trade costs can spur aggregate productivity by forcing lower productivity firms out of the market, cutting off the lower tail of the productivity distribution. In this paper we find significant...