We develop a simple model of international trade with heterogeneous firms that is consistent with a number of stylized features of the data. In particular, the model predicts positive as well as zero trade flows across pairs of countries, and it allows the number of exporting firms to vary...

A large and growing share of international trade is carried on airplanes. Air cargo is many times more expensive than maritime transport but arrives in destination markets much faster. We model firms' choice between exporting goods using fast but expensive air cargo and slow but cheap ocean...

Innovative activity is highly concentrated in a handful of advanced countries. These same countries are also the major exporters of capital goods to the rest of the world. We develop a model of trade in capital goods to assess its role spreading the benefits of technological advances. Applying...

This research investigates the extent to which countries use public standards as a means of political retaliation in the international policy arena. We construct a dataset that matches the adoption of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards between 1996-2015 with SPS committee data on...

Set-asides and subsidies are used extensively in government procurement and natural resource sales. We analyze these policies in an empirical model of U.S. Forest Service timber auctions. The model fits the data well both within the sample of unrestricted sales where we estimate the model, and...

Most empirical policy work requires the aggregation of policies. Trade policy aggregation exemplifies the aggregation problem poignantly, with thousands of highly dispersed trade barriers. This paper provides methods of policy aggregation that are consistent with two common objectives of...

This paper calculates the Anderson-Neary (2005) trade restrictiveness index (TRI) for the United States using nearly a century of data. The results show that the standard import-weighted average tariff understates the TRI, defined as the uniform tariff that yields the same welfare loss as the...

This paper addresses the final steps to global free trade -- the political economy forces that might drive them, and the role the WTO might play in guiding them. Two facts form the departure point: 1) Regionalism is here to stay; 2) the motley assortment of regional trade agreements is not the...

We weigh into the debate about whether rising productivity is ever a consequence rather than a cause of exporting. Exporting and investing to raise productivity are complimentary activities. For lower-productivity firms, incurring the fixed costs of such investments is justifiable only if...

This chapter assesses China's integration into the global trading system by examining areas of international political-economic quot;frictionquot; associated with its increased trade. We use a number of newly constructed data sets to examine tensions associated with its rapidly increasing trade...