Product availability impacts many industries such as transportation, events, and retail, yet little empirical evidence documents the importance of stocking decisions for firm profits, vertical relationships, or consumers. We conduct several experiments, exogenously removing top-selling products...

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 develop a property-rights model of the firm in which production entails a continuum of uniquely sequenced stages. In each stage, a final-good producer contracts with a distinct supplier for the procurement of a customized stage-specific component. Our model yields a sharp characterization for...

We develop a stylized model that captures the phenomena of decoupling and recoupling in an environment where heterogeneous entrepreneurial sectors face financial constraints in their relationship with a common set of lenders. In response to adverse shocks, a financially constrained sector must...

In this paper we develop a monopolistic competition model where firms exercise their market power across multiple products. Even with CES preferences, markups are endogenous. Firms choose their optimal product scope by balancing the net profits from a new variety against the costs of...

Synchronized expansions and contractions across sectors define business cycles. Yet synchronization is puzzling because productivity across sectors exhibits weak correlation. While previous work examined production complementarity, our analysis explores complementarity in information...

For centuries, most international trade involved an exchange of complete goods. But, with recent improvements in transportation and communications technology, it increasingly entails different countries adding value to global supply chains, or what might be called quot;trade in tasks.quot; We...

The rise of offshoring of intermediate inputs raises important questions for commercial policy. Do the distinguishing features of offshoring introduce novel reasons for trade policy intervention? Does offshoring create new problems of global policy cooperation whose solutions require...

The inefficiencies related to endogenous product creation and variety under monopolistic competition are two-fold: one static—the misalignment between consumers and producers regarding the value of a new variety; and one dynamic—time variation in markups. Quantitatively, the welfare costs of...

There is wide variation in the sizes of manufacturing plants, even within the most narrowly defined industry classifications used by statistical agencies. Standard theories attribute all such size differences to productivity differences. This paper develops an alternative theory in which...