Recent research in international trade emphasizes the importance of firms extensive margins for understanding overall patterns of trade as well as how firms respond to specific events such as trade liberalization. In this paper, we use detailed U.S. trade statistics to provide a broad overview...

International trade models typically assume that producers in one country trade directly with final consumers in another. In reality, of course, trade can involve long chains of potentially independent actors who move goods through wholesale and retail distribution networks. These networks...

We develop a method for identifying departures from relative factor price equality that is robust to unobserved variation in factor productivity. We implement this method using data on the relative wage bills of non-production and production workers across 170 local labor markets comprising the...

Standard models of international trade devote little attention to firms. Yet of the 5.5 million firms operating in the United States in 2000, just 4 percent engaged in exporting, and the top 10 percent of these exporting firms accounted for 96 percent of U.S. exports. Since the mid 1990s, a...

This paper examines the frequency, pervasiveness and determinants of product switching by U.S. manufacturing firms. We find that one-half of firms alter their mix of five-digit SIC products every five years, that product switching is correlated with both firm- and firm-product attributes, and...

When firms make decisions about which product to manufacture at a more disaggregated level than observed in the data, measured firm productivity will reflect both true differences in productivity and non-random decisions about which products to manufacture. This paper examines a model of...

This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in U.S. imports using detailed country-product data. We create a new measure of product contractibility based on the degree of intermediation in international trade for the product. We find important roles for the interaction of country...

This paper finds a link between the sharp drop in U.S. manufacturing employment beginning in 2001 and a change in U.S. trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries where the threat of tariff hikes declines the most experience more severe employment...

This paper: outlines an algorithm for concording U.S. ten-digit Harmonized System export and import codes over time; describes the concordances we construct for 1989 to 2004; and provides Stata code that can be used to construct similar concordances for arbitrary beginning and ending years from 1989...

This paper documents the extent and characteristics of plants and firms in the US that are outside the manufacturing sector according to official government statistics but nonetheless are heavily involved in activities related to the production of manufactured goods. Using new data on...