Estimating the effect of trade on capital flows is difficult given the inherent identification problem. We use fluctuations in rainfall to capture the exogenous variation in trade between Germany, France, the U.K., and the Ottoman Empire during 1859-1913. The provisionistic policy of the Ottoman...

Do international trade and finance flow together? In theory, trade and finance can be substitutes or complements, so the matter must be resolved empirically. We study trade and financial flows from the United Kingdom from 1870 to 1913 and the United States in the interwar years. Trade and...

The unprecedented drop in international trade during the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 has mainly been analysed at the macroeconomic or sectoral level. However, exporters who are heterogeneous in terms of productivity, size or external financial dependence should be...

Global trade contracted quickly and severely during the global crisis. This paper, using a unique dataset of French firms, matching together export data with firm-level credit constraints, shows that most of the 2008-2009 trade collapse is accounted by the unprecedented demand shock and by...

The failure of trade economists to anticipate the extreme drop in trade post Lehman Brothers bankruptcy suggests that the behavior of trade in exceptional circumstances may still be poorly understood. This paper explores whether uncertainty shocks have explanatory power for movements in trade....

This paper investigates the effects of ethnic violence on export-oriented firms and their workers. Following the disputed 2007 Kenyan presidential election, export volumes of flower firms affected by the ensuing violence dropped by 38 percent and worker absence exceeded 50 percent. Large firms...

This paper argues that, under certain conditions, firms consider export activity as a substitute of serving domestic demand. Our econometric model for six euro area countries suggests domestic demand pressure and capacity constraint restrictions as additional variables of a properly specified...

Existing South African work on firm-level data has been limited by access to large datasets that track firms over time. This paper overcomes this by analysing a new dataset of the population of manufacturing firms that are matched to their export transactions. South African firm-level exporting...

We conduct a randomized control trial that generates exogenous variation in the access to foreign markets for rug producers in Egypt. Combined with detailed survey data, we causally identify the impact of exporting on firm performance. Treatment firms report 15-25 percent higher profits and...

We propose two distinct approaches to the measurement of industry upstreamness (or average distance from final use) and show that they yield an equivalent measure. Furthermore, we provide two additional interpretations of this measure, one of them related to the concept of forward linkages in...