We construct a game theoretic model of an oligarchic economy that potentially could be targeted by smart international sanctions. Oligarchs in this economy provide support for their leader, a strong man and potentially an autocrat, in return for favors that results in having income higher than...

This note studies exchange rate pass-through to the prices of domestically produced goods, exploring the firm-level pricing survey conducted by the Bank of Korea. The data reveal the imported inputs channel of, as well as nonlinear and asymmetric, exchange rate-pass-through.

We investigate whether global value chains have increased the sensitivity of Chinese trade to foreign income shocks. This may occur through either composition or supply chain effects. We find evidence for the former, but not the latter.

Within the context of a product variety model, this paper examines the impact of outsourcing of skill-intensive tasks on the skilled–unskilled wage gap. Outsourcing affects the wage gap through direct as well as indirect channels. While outsourcing decreases the effective wage of skilled...

This letter provides an approach to decompose the value added content of trade into foreign and domestic components when intermediates are traded. The measure adds to the existing literature by considering both exports and imports simultaneously. In this way this approach generalizes the...

I provide new estimates of border frictions for 14 countries using local, national, and international Big Mac prices. I find that borders generally introduce only small price wedges, far smaller than those observed across New York City neighboring locations.

We compute the tradable and non-tradable input shares for consumption and investment from the latest release of OECD input–output tables. We document that input shares (the content of tradable and non-tradable goods per unit of final demand) differ substantially from final demand shares (the...

I propose a simple solution to the distance puzzle in international trade. Contrary to existing estimates of persistent or increasing distance effects on trade, I offer robust evidence that the impact of distance on trade has fallen steadily over time.

This article studies the firm-level productivity convergence process in the 1990s and the 2000s in France. The speed of convergence has slowed during the course of the 1990s, a fact which is explained principally by the acceleration of the productivity of firms on the technological frontier....

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of pollution and study in a holistic way the environmental policies, whereby government sets up emission caps and sells emission permits at a competitive price which can be viewed as an emission tax. Then, it uses the collected tax revenues to...