Did the 2018/19 US-China trade war trigger adjustment of Global Value Chains (GVCs) and nearshoring to Mexico? We address this question with confidential longitudinal firm-level trade data from Mexico that covers the universe of international trade transactions over 2015-2021. By merging the...

Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a...

This paper compares drivers of full COVID-19 vaccinations and booster doses across U.S. counties. Booster doses are contingent upon someone receiving the primary doses, and the risk attitudes and propensities to get vaccinated may be different across individuals, along with the supply chain...

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of technology shocks in explaining aggregate fluctuations. To this end we estimate the model's posterior density using Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) methods. Within this framework we...

This paper develops a model of the war against illegal drugs in both producer and consumer countries. The paper studies the trade-off faced by the government of the drug consumer country between prevention policies (aimed at reducing the demand for drugs) and enforcement policies (aimed at...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

This paper conducts a broad-based comparison of iterated and direct multi-step forecasting approaches applied to both univariate and multivariate models. Theoretical results and Monte Carlo simulations suggest that iterated forecasts dominate direct forecasts when estimation error is a...