Distribution of goods often involves multiple intermediaries engaged in sequential buying and reselling. Why do these chains of intermediation exist, and what are their implications for consumers? We show that multi-intermediary chains arise in response to internal economies of scale in trade...

We review theoretical and empirical work on the economic effects of the United States and China trade relations during the last decades. We first discuss the origins of the China shock, its measurement, and present methods used to study its economic effects on different outcomes. We then focus...

International transactions are costly because they require investments in logistics, contracts, and the acquisition of local institutional knowledge. We posit that a portion of the fixed costs of entering a specific export market can be used toward costs of acquiring imports from that same...

We quantify and explain the firm responses and worker impacts of foreign demand shocks to domestic production networks. To capture that firms can be indirectly exposed to such shocks by buying from or selling to domestic firms that import or export, we use Belgian data with information on both...

Multinational firms (MNEs) accounted for 42 percent of US manufacturing employment, 87 percent of US imports, and 84 of US exports in 2007. Despite their disproportionate share of global trade, MNEs' input sourcing and final-good production decisions are often studied separately. Using newly...

Import tariffs tend to be higher for final goods than for inputs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as tariff escalation. Yet neoclassical trade theory - and modern Ricardian trade models, in particular - predict that welfare-maximizing tariffs are uniform across sectors. We show that tariff...

This paper develops a framework to study the interplay between world trade and interest rates. The model incorporates an explicit notion of time and of production length, along the lines of the 'Austrian' tradition of Böhm-Bawerk (1889). Changes in the interest rate affect production lengths,...

Transportation infrastructure is vital for the smooth functioning of international trade. Ports are a crucial gateway to this system: with more than 80% of trade carried by ships, they shape trade costs, and it is critical that they operate efficiently. Yet ports are susceptible to disruptions,...

We measure export participation rates in the U.S. manufacturing sector using a new administrative dataset and compare them to participation rates constructed from the commonly used Census of Manufacturers (CM). Both at the establishment and firm level export participation rates are near 40...

We use the 2018-2019 U.S. trade war to examine how supply chains adjustments to a tariff cost shock affect imports and exports. Using confidential firm-trade linked data, we show that the decline in imports of tariffed goods was driven by discontinuations of U.S. buyer-foreign supplier...