This paper analyzes the effects of international openness on vertical integration. Vertical integration can confer a negative externality, by thinning the market for inputs and thus worsening opportunism problems; this induces strategic complementarity and multiple equilibria in the integration...

The rise of offshoring of intermediate inputs raises important questions for commercial policy. Do the distinguishing features of offshoring introduce novel reasons for trade policy intervention? Does offshoring create new problems of global policy cooperation whose solutions require...

We show that endogenous firm selection provides a new welfare margin for heterogeneous firm models of trade (relative to homogeneous firm models). Under some parameter restrictions, the trade elasticity is constant and is a sufficient statistic for welfare, along with the domestic trade share....

We analyze the international operations of multinational firms to measure the spatial barriers to transferring knowledge. We model firms that can transfer bits of knowledge to their foreign affiliates in either embodied (traded intermediates) or disembodied form (direct communication). The model...

The Bagwell and Staiger (1990) theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts new tariffs (i) increase with imports, (ii) increase with the inverse of the sum of the import demand and export supply elasticities, and (iii) decrease with the variance of imports. We find US import policy during...

We find that prior to World Trade Organization membership, countries set import tariffs 9 percentage points higher on inelastically supplied imports relative to those supplied elastically. The magnitude of this effect is similar to the size of average tariffs in these countries, and market power...

International relative prices across industrialized countries show large and systematic deviations from relative purchasing power parity. We embed a model of imperfect competition and variable markups in a quantitative model of international trade. We find that when our model is parameterized to...

We evaluate two alternative models of international trade in differentiated products. An increasing returns model where varieties are linked to firms predicts home market effects: increases in a country's share of demand cause disproportionate increases in its share of output. In contrast, a...