The unit values of internationally traded goods are heavily influenced by quality. We model this in an extended monopolistic competition framework where, in addition to choosing price, firms simultaneously choose quality. We allow countries to have non-homothetic demand for quality. The optimal...

This paper explores the relationship between exchange rate pass-through and market share for monopolistically competitive exporters. Under fairly general assumptions we show that pass-through should be high for exporters based in a country with a very large share of total destination market...

This paper uses a dynamic optimization model to estimate the welfare gains of hedging against commodity price risk for commodity-exporting countries. We show that the introduction of hedging instruments such as futures and options enhances domestic welfare through two channels. First, by...

We model the motives for residents of a country to hold foreign assets, including the precautionary motive that has been omitted from much previous literature as intractable. Our model captures many of the principal insights from the existing specialized literature on the precautionary motive,...

In this paper we consider a home government with political pressure to restrict trade, at the expense of foreigners. The foreign country is compensated with an income transfer, which can be thought of as a portion of the tariff revenues or quota rents. In this setting the two countries should...

We show in a multi-sector, heterogeneous-firm trade model that the effect of tariffs on entry, especially in the presence of production linkages, can reverse the traditional positive optimal tariff argument. We then use a new tariff dataset, and apply it to a 189-country, 15-sector version of...

This paper analyzes the case for the international coordination of macroprudential policies in the context of a simple theoretical framework. Both domestic macroprudential policies and prudential capital controls have international spillovers through their impact on capital flows. The...

Standard theoretical arguments tell us that countries with relatively little capital benefit from financial integration as foreign capital flows in and speeds up the process of convergence. We show in a calibrated neoclassical model that conventionally measured welfare gains from this type of...

This paper analyzes prudential controls on capital flows to emerging markets from the perspective of a Pigouvian tax that addresses externalities associated with the deleveraging cycle. It presents a model in which restricting capital inflows during boom times reduces the potential outflows...

This paper describes two databases dealing with world bilateral trade flows: the World Trade Database (WTDB) assembled by Statistics Canada, which contains bilateral trade flows for all countries over 1970-1992, classified according to the Standard International Trade Classification, Revision 2...