The enormous global demand for smartphones in recent years has created a new global tech cycle. In 2016 alone, global smartphone sales reached close to 1.5 billion, one for every fifth person on earth. In turn, this has engendered complex and evolving supply chains across Asia. We show that the...

Global smartphone sales may have peaked. After reaching nearly 1.5 billion units in 2016, global smartphone sales have since declined, contributing negatively to world trade in 2019 and suggesting that the global market may now be saturated. This paper develops a simple model to forecast...

Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign than native-born workers following economic shocks helps to facilitate local labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. We examine the role that immigration may have played in enabling U.S. commuting...

This paper studies how differences in labor market regulations shape countries' comparative advantage in the cross-border provision of labor-intensive services, using administrative data in Europe for the last two decades. I exploit exogenous variation in labor taxes and minimum wages faced by...

We present a gravity model that accounts for multilateral resistance, firm heterogeneity and country-selection into trade, while accommodating asymmetries in trade flows. A new equation for the proportion of exporting firms takes a gravity form, such that the extensive margin is also affected by...

Global merchandise trade expanded rapidly over the last 6 1/2 decades and its relationship with global income has seen ebbs and flows. This paper examines the shifts in this relationship using time series data over 1950-2014 and situates it in the current and longer term context. The...

This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the relationship between trade and...

Global trade growth has slowed since 2012 relative both to its strong historical performance and to overall economic growth. This paper aims to quantify the role of weak economic growth and changes in its decomposition in accounting for the slowdown in trade using a reduced form and a structural...

Recent work documents declining business dynamism in the United States, with concerning implications for markups, innovation and productivity. Using import data for 146 countries over three decades we document a set of new stylized facts describing market dynamism world-wide. Market entry rates...

This paper considers the evolution of global transportation usage over the past half century and its implications for supply chains. Transportation usage per unit of real output has more than doubled as costs decreased by a third. Participation of emerging economies in world trade and...