In this paper we derive a new measure of openness--trade potential index--that quantifies potential gains from trade as a simple function of data. Using a standard multicountry trade model, we measure openness by a country's potential welfare gain from moving to a world with frictionless trade....

The difficulty of incorporating general equilibrium price effects into econometric estimating equations has deterred most researchers from econometrically estimating the welfare gains from trade liberalization. Using a paired-down CES monopolistic competition example, we show that this...

It is well documented that retail prices in Japan are higher than in other countries for similar products. The two main competing explanations for this finding are: (1) a relatively high degree of discriminatory practices against imports and (2) relatively high distribution costs associated with...

This paper measures the degree of price discrimination across export destinations that is associated with exchange rate changes using U.S., U.K., German and Japanese industry-level data. Given the industries sampled more price discrimination across destinations is observed in the U.K., German...

While there is strong evidence for productivity-driven selection into exporting, the empirical literature has struggled to identify export-related efficiency gains within plants. Previous research typically derived revenue productivity (TFPR), which is downward biased if more efficient producers...

We measure the role of firm heterogeneity in counterfactual predictions of monopolistic competition trade models without parametric restrictions on the distribution of firm fundamentals. We show that two bilateral elasticity functions are sufficient to nonparametrically compute the...