This paper quantifies the origins of firm size heterogeneity when firms are interconnected in a production network. Using the universe of buyer-supplier relationships in Belgium, the paper develops a set of stylized facts that motivate a model in which firms buy inputs from upstream suppliers...

Firm-to-firm connections in domestic and international production networks play a fundamental role in economic outcomes. Firm heterogeneity and the sparse nature of firm-to-firm connections implicitly discipline network structure. We find that a large group of well-established statistical...

One of the most successful empirical relationships in international trade is the gravity equation, which relates bilateral trade flows between an origin and destination to bilateral trade frictions, origin characteristics, and destination characteristics. A key decision for researchers in...

We develop and structurally estimate a model of heterogeneous multiproduct firms that can be used to decompose the firm-size distribution into the contributions of costs, "appeal" (quality or taste), markups, and product scope. Using Nielsen bar-code data on prices and sales, we find that...

Do New York and Nashville face the same pressures from increased trade? This paper considers the role of international trade in shaping the product mix and relative wages for regions within the US. Using the predictions from a Heckscher-Ohlin trade model, we ask whether all the regions in the US...

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the export decision by a profit-maximizing firm. Using a panel of U.S. manufacturing plants, we test for the role of plant characteristics, spillovers from neighboring exporters, entry costs and government export promotion expenditures. Entry and exit in...

A growing body of empirical work has documented the superior performance characteristics" of exporting plants and firms relative to non-exporters. Employment, shipments and capital intensity are all higher at exporters at any given moment. This paper asks whether good" firms become exporters or...

Many previous tests of Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory have found underwhelming support for the idea that countries' endowments determine their production and trade. This paper demonstrates that those efforts suffer from their focus on the narrower of the model's two potential equilibria, which...

This paper explores role of product adding and dropping within manufacturing firms over the business cycle. While a substantial body of work has explored the importance of the extensive margins of firm entry and exit in employment and output flows, only recently has research begun to examine the...