Services form an increasing proportion of the inputs used in manufacturing. We explore empirically whether competition in the service sector affects downstream manufacturing firms' efficiency, via the inputs used. Using French micro-data for services, we calculate proxies for competition in...

Helpman, Melitz and Rubinstein (2008) derive gravity equations to estimate effects of trade barriers on the intensive and extensive margins of trade. They exploit the frequency of zeros in aggregate bilateral trade data to identify effects on the extensive margin and to obtain controls for firm...

The research on the location choice for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is traditionally restricted to a choice between countries. The within-country location choice is less prominent in the literature. If within-country location decisions are considered it is mostly limited to Greenfield...

Recent theoretical research shows that exporters are more productive than nonexporters. We show that this result holds almost trivially for the case of constant marginal cost of production, as mainly assumed in the literature, but it may not hold true if the marginal cost is not constant. Our...

Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...

Recent quantitative trade models treat import tariffs as pure cost shifters so that their effects are similar to iceberg trade costs. We introduce revenue-generating import tariffs, which act as demand shifters, into the framework of Arkolakis, Costinot and Rodriguez-Clare (2012), and generalize...

This paper provides a direct test of how fixed export costs and productivity jointly determine firm-level export behavior. Using Chilean data, we construct indices of fixed export costs for each industry-region-year triplet and match them to domestic firms. Our empirical results show that firms...

I use firm-level data to show that neither the Log-normal nor the Pareto distribution can approximate the shape of the productivity distribution along the entire support. While the former underpredicts the thickness of the right tail, the latter does not capture the shape of the left one. Using...

What has been the overall global welfare impact of the accession to the World Trade Organization of a large country like China, or the global welfare impact of the completion of the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations? Can we come up with a simple user-friendly formula to calculate the global...

This paper studies the evolution of trade freeness and of the agglomeration of production, as well as their relationship, at the sectoral level in a group of EU countries. Our main objective is to test at the sectoral level the conclusions of previous aggregate analyses which find that an...