This paper studies the role of international trade and the export participation decisions of establishments for the entry of establishments over the business cycle in a general equilibrium model. The model captures two key features of establishment and exporter dynamics: i) new establishments...

We study the growth in the share of US manufactured output exported from 1987 to 2002 through the lens of the Melitz (2003) model, a monopolistically competitive model with heterogenous producers and fixed costs of exporting. Using the model, we infer that iceberg costs fell from approximately...

This paper uses a structural model to understand, predict, and evaluate the impact of an exogenous microcredit intervention program, the Thai Million Baht Village Fund program. We model household decisions in the face of borrowing constraints, income uncertainty, and high-yield indivisible...

using a novel plant-level dataset from Taiwan (1992-2004), that new product introductions are a key contributor to increases in plant-level factor productivity. We then formulate and calibrate a span-of-control model of product choice and firm dynamics in which new products embody the frontier...

The classic explanation for the persistence and volatility of real exchange rates is that they are the result of nominal shocks in an economy with sticky goods prices. A key implication of this explanation is that if goods in different sectors have different degrees of price stickiness then...

Using a micro-level dataset of all Korean manufacturing plants, we show that dispersion in the average product of capital are 1) volatile and persistent at the plant-level, 2) small at the industry-level (2- and 5-digit industries), and 3) systematically related to the size and age of a plant....

A pervasive prediction of business cycle models is that investment by firms in durable goods (capital, inventories) is highly sensitive to fluctuations in real interest rates (Thomas 2002, House 2007, Kryvtsov and Midrigan 2008). This prediction stands in sharp contrast with the data: investment...