Recent research in international trade emphasizes the importance of firms' extensive margins for understanding overall patterns of trade as well as how firms respond to specific events such as trade liberalization. In this paper, we use detailed U.S. trade statistics to provide a broad overview...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences...

Economists are skeptical about the economic benefits of hosting quot;mega-eventsquot; such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup, since such activities have considerable cost and seem to yield few tangible benefits. These doubts are rarely shared by policy-makers and the population, who are...

Over the last three decades, the value of Chinese trade has approximately doubled every four years. This rapid growth has transformed the country from a negligible player in world trade to the world's second largest exporter, as well as a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate...

We ask how export demand shocks associated with the Asian financial crisis affected Chinese exporters. We construct firm-specific exchange rate shocks based on the pre-crisis destinations of firms' exports. Because the shocks were unanticipated and large, they are a plausible instrument for...

What is the role of transport improvements in globalization? We argue that the nineteenth century is the ideal testing ground for this question: freight rates fell on average by 50% while global trade increased 400% from 1870 to 1913. We estimate the first indices of bilateral freight rates for...

The rise of China in world trade has brought both benefits and anxiety to other economies. For many policy questions, it is crucial to know the extent of domestic value added (DVA) in exports, but the computation is more complicated when processing trade is pervasive. We propose a method for...

China's trade pattern is influenced not just by its overall comparative advantage in labor intensive goods but also by geography. We use two variants of the Eaton-Kortum (2002) model to study China's local comparative advantage. The theory predicts that China's share of export markets should...

Between 1992 and 2002, the Japanese Import Price Index registered a decline of almost 9 percent and Japan entered a period of deflation. We show that much of the correlation between import prices and domestic prices was due to formula biases. Had the IPI been computed using a pure Laspeyres...

We study the importance of technology and institutions in determining the size of markets in five different countries and fifteen different German states. The setting of 19th century Europe presents a unique opportunity to address this issue, since it witnessed fundamental change in both...