I build a simple dynamic model of the formation of an international social network of importers and exporters. Firms can only export into markets in which they have a contact. They acquire new contacts both at random, and via their network of existing contacts. This model explains (i) the...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on firm heterogeneity in international trade. A first wave of empirical findings from micro data on plants and firms proposed challenges for existing models of international trade and inspired the development of new theories emphasizing firm...

We document the behavior of trade prices during the Great Trade Collapse of 2008-2009 using transaction-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, we find that differentiated manufactures exhibited marked stability in their trade prices during the large decline in their trade...

We combine data on trade, production, and input use to compute the value added content of trade for forty-two countries from 1970 to 2009. For the world, the ratio of value added to gross trade falls by ten to fifteen percentage points, with two-thirds of this decline in the last two decades....

This article reviews the state of the international trade literature on multinational firms. This literature addresses three main questions. First, why do some firms operate in more than one country while others do not? Second, what determines in which countries production facilities are...

We develop a neoclassical trade model with heterogeneous factors of production. We consider a world with two factors, labor and "managers", each with a distribution of ability levels. Production combines a manager of some type with a group of workers. The output of a unit depends on the types of...

China's emergence as a great economic power has induced an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. Simultaneously, it has challenged much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial...

Uneven development within countries suggests that domestic trade frictions are important. Trade flows within a country, however, are rarely observed. We employ a new dataset on trade between fifteen Chinese treaty ports to examine the importance of domestic frictions around the year 1900. The...

This paper uses newly available data on Chinese trade flows to establish novel and confirm existing stylized facts about firm heterogeneity in trade. First, the bulk of exports and imports are captured by a few multi-product firms that transact with a large number of countries. Second, the...

Though one of the pillars of the theory of international trade, the extreme predictions of the Ricardian model have made it unsuitable for empirical purposes. A seminal contribution of Eaton and Kortum (2002) is to demonstrate that random productivity shocks are sufficient to make the Ricardian...