Many of the facts about the extensive margin of trade—which firms export, and how many products are sent to how many destinations—are consistent with a surprisingly large class of trade models because of the sparse nature of trade data. We propose a statistical model to account for sparsity,...

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets, exploiting cross- market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization and instrumenting for US imports using changes in Chinese imports by...

We provide evidence that increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War, was used to create a larger foreign market for American products. Following CIA interventions, imports from the US increased dramatically, while total exports to the US were unaffected....