Free trade or preferential trade areas (PTAs) allow importers who belong to the area to export to each other while paying zero or preferential tariffs as long as Rules of Origin (ROOs) are met. Meeting them is costly not only in terms of production costs but also in terms of documentation costs....

This chapter investigates the non-market response of firms to international trade shocks increasing the level of competition in U.S. industries. Lobbying expenditures increase as a consequence of import changes related to the China shock. The effect on lobbying is not homogeneous across firms...

There is a growing empirical consensus that trade shocks can have important effects on unemployment and nonemployment across local-labor markets within an economy. This paper introduces downward nominal wage rigidity to an otherwise standard quantitative trade model and shows how this framework...

Instrumental variables (IV) are a common means to identify treatment effects. But standard IV methods do not allow us to unpack the complex treatment effects that arise when a treatment and its outcome together cause a second outcome of interest. For example, IV methods have been used to show...

We survey recent literature on the causes of the collapse in international trade during the 2008-2009 global recession. We argue that the evidence points to the collapse in aggregate expenditure, concentrated on trade-intensive durable goods, as the main driver of the trade collapse. Inventory...