We provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production. To the best of our knowledge, this well-established and important theoretical proposition has not been tested before. Our empirical procedure is summarized as follows. First, we construct a measure of...

This paper examines the effect of Wal-Mart's entry into Mexico on Mexican manufacturers of consumer goods. Guided by firm interviews that suggested substantial heterogeneity across firms in how they responded to Wal-Mart's entry, we develop a dynamic industry model in which firms decide whether...

We expect trade liberalization to give rise to aggregate productivity gains, as the least efficient firms are forced out, and labor is reallocated towards the best performing firms. But the positive intra-industry reallocation effects rely on the stark assumption that exporters’ superior...

We use unique plant-level data to study the link between the local availability of services and the decision of manufacturing firms to source materials from abroad. To guide our empirical analysis we develop a monopolistic-competition model of the materials sourcing decisions of heterogeneous...

This paper presents and tests a new model of multinational firms to explain a rich array of multinational behavior. In contrast to most approaches, here the multinational faces costs to transferring its know-how that are increasing in technological complexity. Costly technology transfer gives...

Our concern is about a firm-specific industrial policy. When R&D subsidies or taxes are differentiated among firms, the question arises which firms in an industry should receive such support. We analyse a situation where firms differ in their R&D technologies in two distinct ways: they differ...

We distill the main insights from recent trade models on firms' responses to globalisation. Our primary aim is to assess the economic impact and the welfare implications of the resulting reallocation of resources across firms and countries. In so doing, we bring theory into life through the...

We develop a new general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms, variable demand elasticity and multiple asymmetric regions, in which trade integration induces wage and productivity changes. Using Canada-US interregional trade data, we structurally estimate a...

This paper documents that debt and equity issuance are procyclical for most size-sorted firm categories of listed U.S. firms. The procyclicality of equity issuance decreases monotonically with firm size. At the aggregate level, however, the results are not conclusive. The reason is that issuance...

How successful is the theory of the firm in explaining intra-firm trade? To answer this question we exploit a unique dataset of 1,141,393 French import transactions, spanning across firm, countries and products in 1999, and reporting whether a transaction is intra-firm. Overall, we find support...