We study the role of exchange rates in industrial policy. We construct an open-economy macroeconomic framework with production externalities and show that the desirability of these policies critically depends on the dynamic patterns of externalities. When they are stronger in earlier stages of...

We estimate annual discontinuities in remotely-sensed crop yields at all international land borders and link them to changes in the economic freedom index by the Fraser Institute, a country-level measure of institutional quality. Each point of the ten-point index increases the discontinuity by...

This paper identifies a credit-supply contraction that arises endogenously after trade liberalization. Banks with loan portfolios concentrated in sectors exposed to competition from China face an increase in non-performing loans after China's entry into the World Trade Organization. As a result,...

Data on global trade as well as capital and labor flows indicate a slowdown, but not reversal, of globalization post the 2008-09 financial crisis. Yet profound changes in the policy environment and public sentiment in the largest economies over the past five years suggest the beginning of a new...

The last two centuries witnessed the rise and fall of empires. We construct a model which rationalises this in terms of the changing trade gains from empires. In the model, empires are arrangements that reduce trade cost between an industrial metropole and the agricultural periphery. During...

We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word "uncertainty" in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the...

I explore whether the world trading system of the twentieth century can be adapted to address the challenges of the twenty-first. I first develop an understanding of how GATT functioned during the twentieth century, and which features of the economic environment were most important in...

We develop a simple (incumbent versus entrant) strategic deterrence model to study the economic and geopolitical interactions underlying international trade-related infrastructure projects such as the Panama Canal. We study the incentives for global geopolitical players to support allied...

Considerable progress has been made in our understanding of the relationship between international trade and the environment since Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger published their now seminal working paper examining the potential environmental effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement in...

In the public imagination globalization's adverse effects have loomed large, contributing significantly to the backlash against the political mainstream and the rise of far-right populism. The literature on trade and inequality is in fact exceptionally rich, with important theoretical insights...