This paper examines the impact of trade on employment, wages, and other outcomes across countries and explores the conditions and policies that help spread the gains from trade more evenly throughout the population. We exploit a large global firm-level dataset to examine the impact of import...

We develop a new Measure of Aggregate Trade Restrictions (MATR) using data from the IMF's Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions. MATR is an empirical measure of how restrictive official government policy is towards the international flow of goods and services. MATR is...

The links between trade and growth are examined in a neoclassical model of an open economy in which domestic production requires both domestic and imported inputs. The model shows that trade distortions induced by such government policies as tariffs and exchange controls generate cross-country...

This paper studies the political influence of individual firms on Congressional decisions to suspend tariffs on U.S. imports of intermediate goods. We develop a model in which firms influence the government by transmitting information about the value of protection, via costless messages...

We examine the extent to which regulations of entry and credit access are related to competition using data on 28 manufacturing sectors across 64 countries. A robust finding is that bureaucratic and costly entry regulations tend to hamper competition, as proxied by the price-cost margin, in the...

All common real effective exchange rate indexes assume trade is only in final goods, despite the growing presence of global supply chains. Extending effective exchange rate indexes to include such intermediate goods can imply radically different effective exchange rate weights, depending on the...

This paper estimates equilibrium dollar wages for 15 transition economies. Equilibrium dollar wages are interpreted as full employment wages consistent with a country’s physical and human capital endowment, and estimated by regressing actual dollar wages on productivity and human capital...

The carbon tax is a major instrument for curbing greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Yet its adoption has been limited because of concerns over its effects on economic growth, income distribution, and international competitiveness. The paper shows that policymakers can minimize...