The United States imports intermediate inputs from China, helping downstream US firms to expand employment. Using a cross-regional reduced-form specification but differing from the existing literature, this paper (a) incorporates a supply chain perspective, (b) uses intermediate input imports...

We develop a unified framework to trace value added along global supply chains in the presence of foreign direct investment by decomposing either GDP based on forward linkages or final production based on backward linkages. The new framework accounts for the presence of foreign invested...

While major stock market indices are followed by large monetary investments, we document that membership decisions for the S&P 500 index have a nontrivial amount of discretion. We show that firms' purchases of S&P ratings appear to improve their chance of entering the index (but purchases of...

This paper investigates whether "natural" trade barriers of a country due to geography and other factors outside the country's control stimulate more or less policy barriers such as tariffs. Our theory predicts that the politician's relative weight on private benefits over social welfare in a...

We find that an unanticipated tightening of US monetary policy tends to raise US import prices. This empirical "spill-back" pattern differs from the predictions of typical open-economy macro models. We also document a new empirical "spillover" effect: import prices of other countries also rise...

This paper offers a new interpretation of the connection between openness and good governance. Assuming that corruption and bad governance drive out international trade and investment more than domestic trade and investment, a naturally more open economy' as determined by its size and geography...

A puzzle in empirical international finance is the difficulty in finding a large and negative effect of exchange rate volatility on international trade. A common explanation is the availability of hedging instruments. This paper examines the empirical validity of this explanation using data on...

This paper examines the effect of corruption-induced uncertainty on foreign direct" investment. The measure of uncertainty is constructed based on unpublished individual survey" responses on levels of corruption in host countries. The result is striking. The effect is negative statistically...

The paper studies the effect of the market's perceived exchange rate volatility on bid-ask spreads. The anticipated volatility is extracted from currency options data. An increase in the perceived volatility is found to widen bid-ask spreads. The direction of the effect is consistent with an...

Vaccination rates have a statistically significant downward effect on the Covid-19 death rate across US counties, as of August 12, 2021. Controlling for poverty rates, age, and temperature lowers the magnitude of the estimate a little. Using the Biden-Trump vote in the 2020 election as an...