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...

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...

This paper sets up a model of trade, in which two countries with differing levels of technology specialize in the production of sub-stages of the global value chain. In the open economy, the technologically backward country exports intermediates in exchange for imports of a homogeneous...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to flexibly infer border barriers are often missing for services, we derive a novel methodology for projecting output data. The empirical...

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...

If a free trade agreement (FTA) is characterized by the exchange of market access with a large and competitive trading partner, the agreement can cause a leakage of protectionist benefits to domestic industry from lobbying against external tariff cuts. This rent destruction effect of an FTA can...

Opposing theoretical predictions on the effects of trade preferences on multilateral tariff cuts point to the need for empirical analysis to determine whether preferential trade agreements promote or hinder multilateral trade liberalization. This paper examines the impact of Japan's trade...

To understand the effects of trade policy uncertainty on firm-level export decisions, we study firm-product data on Chinese exports to the U.S. in the years surrounding China's 2001 WTO accession. Following predictions based on a model of heterogeneous firms, we provide empirical evidence that...

The fragmentation of production across borders allows firms to make and export final goods, or to perform only intermediate stages of production by processing imported inputs for re-exporting. We examine how financial frictions affect companies’ choice between processing and ordinary trade -...

While "mega FTAs" and WTO-driven efforts at multilateral liberalisation dominate the agenda, customs unions (CU) are the silent success story of regional integration. Throughout the world, CUs have been superseding earlier FTAs, as new unions were formed or old ones expanded. Due to problems of...