International trade models typically assume that producers in one country trade directly with final consumers in another. In the real world, of course, trade can involve long chains of potentially independent actors who move goods through wholesale and retail distribution networks. These...

This paper reviews the new approach to international trade based on firm heterogeneity in differentiated product markets. This approach explains a variety of features exhibited in disaggregated trade data, including the higher productivity of exporters relative to non-exporters, within-industry...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on firm heterogeneity in international trade. A first wave of empirical findings from micro data on plants and firms proposed challenges for existing models of international trade and inspired the development of new theories emphasizing firm...

This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in U.S. imports using detailed country-product data. We create a new measure of product contractibility based on the degree of intermediation in international trade for the product. We find important roles for the interaction of country...

The theoretical literature on endogenous growth and international trade suggests that comparative advantage is endogenous. Sector-specific learning by doing and technology transfer respectively provide reasons why initial patterns of international specialization may persist or exhibit mobility...

The theoretical result that there are welfare gains from trade is a central tenet of international economics. In a class of trade models that satisfy a "gravity equation", the welfare gains from trade can be computed using only the open economy domestic trade share and the elasticity of trade...

This Paper surveys the empirical literature on the economic geography of trade flows, factor prices, and the location of production. The discussion is structured around the empirical predictions of a canonical theoretical model. We review empirical evidence on the determinants of trade costs and...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences...

This Paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

This Paper investigates the determinants of countries’ export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries’ exports into the contribution from increases in external demand and from...