Multinational enterprises (MNEs) increasingly impose "Responsible Sourcing" (RS) standards on their suppliers worldwide, including requirements on worker compensation, benefits and working conditions. Are these policies just "hot air" or do they impact exposed suppliers and their workers? What...

This paper analyzes frameworks for the design of the rules for international trading, assuming that it is possible to have some rule of law. In the Arrow-Debreu benchmark, where there is no economic power and political power is seemingly irrelevant, there is no need for trade agreements - free...

We use the new dataset of trade flows across 269 European regions in 24 countries constructed in Santamaría et al. (2020) to systematically explore for the first time trade patterns within and across country borders. We focus on the differences between home trade, country trade and foreign...

This paper considers the impact on trade of preferential arrangements in Europe since the 1950s. Using a first difference version of the gravity model, we find that the EC and EFTA altered the pattern of international trade. We also find evidence of trade diversion in several cases, notably that...

In our European Economic Review (2002) paper, we used pre-1998 data on countries participating in and leaving currency unions to estimate the effect of currency unions on trade using (then-) conventional gravity models. In this paper, we use a variety of empirical gravity models to estimate the...

We study the role of export credit agencies--the predominant tool of industrial policy--on firm behavior by using the effective shutdown of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) from 2015-2019 as a natural experiment. We show that firms that previously relied on EXIM support saw a...

We exploit a natural experiment to study the extent to which popular attitudes toward trade are driven by economic fundamentals. In 2007, Costa Rica put a free trade agreement (FTA) to a national referendum. With a single question on the ballot, 59% of Costa Rican adult citizens cast a vote on...

Price theory says that the most important effects of policy and technological change are often found beyond their first point of contact. This appears opposed to econometric methods that rule out spillovers of one person's treatment on another's outcomes. This paper uses the industry model from...

Recent work shows that popular partially-linear regression specifications can put negative weights on some treatment effects, potentially producing incorrectly-signed estimands. We counter by showing that negative weights are no problem in design-based specifications, in which low-dimensional...

Many studies in economics use instruments or treatments which combine a set of exogenous shocks with other predetermined variables by a known formula. Examples include shift-share instruments and measures of social or spatial spillovers. We review recent econometric tools for this setting, which...