We investigate how protectionist policies influence short-run economic growth. Our empirical strategy exploits an extraordinary tax scandal that gave rise to an unexpected change of government in Sweden. A free-trade majority in parliament was overturned by a protectionist majority in 1887. The...

The economic effects of a pandemic crucially depend on the extend to which countries are connected in global production networks. In this paper we incorporate production barriers induced by COVID-19 shock into a Ricardian model with sectoral linkages, trade in intermediate goods and sectoral...

In this paper we highlight a new complementary channel to the business and social network effect à la Rauch (2001) through which immigrants generate increased export flows from the regions in which they settle to their countries of origin: they can become entrepreneurs. Using very small-scale...

How do exporters expand their product scope and geographical presence? We argue that new exporters are uncertain about their profitability in different countries and products, but learn it as they start to export. As a consequence, exporters add products and countries sequentially, in an...

The exceptional export performance of foreign-owned firms is a well-established stylized fact, but the underlying mechanism is not yet fully understood. In this paper, we provide theory and empirical evidence demonstrating that this fact can be explained by ownership differences in access to...

Global value chains have fundamentally transformed international trade and development in recent decades. We use matched firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to examine how Chinese firms position themselves in global production lines and...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

This paper studies how a positive export shock - the sharp increase in garment-sector exports that began at the end of the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) - spread through Bangladesh's labor markets. Although the end of the MFA was arguably exogenous to Bangladesh, we instrument export demand with...

We use newly available representative panel data for manufacturing enterprises in West and East Germany to investigate the link between production-related subsidies and exports. We document that only a small fraction of enterprises is subsidized, and that exports and subsidies are positively...

Does "infant industry" preferential access durably boost export performance? This paper exploits significant trade policy changes in the United States (US) to address this question. The expansion of Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) products for less developed countries in 1997 and the...