We survey the recent literature studying the effects of globalization on inequality in Latin America. Our focus is on research emerging from the late 2000s onward, with an emphasis on empirical work considering new mechanisms, studying new dimensions of inequality, and developing new...

The sharp gyrations of the dollar and of the trade deficit in the 1980s were among the most novel and least understood economic developments of the decade. This paper, which was written as part of the NBER project on American economic policy in the 1980s, examines the reasons for the dollar's...

The large trade and current account deficits of the United States cannot continue indefinitely because doing so would constitute a permanent gift to the U.S. economy. The process that will cause this gift to shrink and that will eventually cause it to reverse is a fall in the dollar. The dollar...

Given the rapidly growing reserves in Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) and the pressures from trading partners to revalue, there is a need to examine commercial policy in more than a pure barter model. Here we evaluate the joint impacts of exchange rate appreciation on trade flows and country...

This paper presents numerical simulation results that suggest that China can both reduce its trade imbalance and receive welfare benefits by switching the value added tax (VAT) regime from the current destination principle to an origin principle. With the tax on exports exceeding that no longer...

We investigate the role of trade imbalances for the distributional consequences of globalization. We do so through the lens of a quantitative, general equilibrium, multi-country, multi-sector model of trade with four key ingredients: (a) workers with different levels of skills are organized into...

This paper studies how differences in labor market regulations shape countries' comparative advantage in the cross-border provision of labor-intensive services, using administrative data in Europe for the last two decades. I exploit exogenous variation in labor taxes and minimum wages faced by...

This study empirically investigates how the invoice currency choice differs between intra-firm and arm's-length exports. We also examine whether other firm- and product-level characteristics affect the choice of invoice currency. This study is the first to be granted access to highly...

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...

This paper considers the evolution of global transportation usage over the past half century and its implications for supply chains. Transportation usage per unit of real output has more than doubled as costs decreased by a third. Participation of emerging economies in world trade and...