We incorporate trade in tasks à la Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into a small open economy version of the theory of firm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how offshoring affects the way firms organize. We show that the offshoring of production tasks leads firms to...

This paper quantitatively explores the role of the demand structure in explaining the relationship between an importer's per capita income and the extensive margin of bilateral trade. The underlying mechanism is based on the fact that agents expand the set of goods they consume with income. This...

This paper develops a quantitative model of trade, military conflicts, and defense spending. Trade liberalization between two countries reduces probability of an armed conict between them, causing both to cut defense spending. This in turn causes a domino effect on defense spending by other...

There is strong evidence that different income groups consume di¤erent bundles of goods. This evidence suggests that trade liberalization can a¤ect welfare inequality within a country via changes in the relative prices of goods consumed by di¤erent income groups (the price effect). In this...

This paper develops a novel approach to modeling references in monopolistic competition models with a continuum of goods. In contrast to the commonly used CES preferences, which do not capture the e¤ects of consumer income and the intensity of competition on equilibrium prices, the present...

There is strong empirical evidence that countries with lower per capita income tend to have smaller trade volumes even after controlling for aggregate income. Furthermore, poorer countries do not just trade less, but have a lower number of trading partners. In this paper, I construct and...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...

Development accounting literature usually attributes the observed cross-country variation in per capita income to differences in countries' factor endowments and total factor productivity (the Solow residual). While the former can be relatively straightforward interpreted and measured, the...