This paper provides a survey of the literature on trade theory, from the classical example of comparative advantage to the New Trade theories currently used by many advanced countries to direct industrial policy and trade. An account is provided of the neo-classical brand of reciprocal demand...

This paper analyzes the role of product quality and labor efficiency in shaping the trade patterns and trade intensities within and across two groups of countries, the developed and richer North and the developing South. Taking prices as a proxy for quality, recent empirical literature...

What drives firms' geographic diversification in international markets? I build a model to show that if some export costs are sunk and shared between alike destinations, the decision of a firm to enter a market is a function of its experience in a similar one. Using a rich firm-level dataset for...

A striking pattern in transaction-level data is the concentration of international shipments in the hands of a few large firms. One common feature of dominating high-performance firms is that they produce multiple products and ship them to many destinations. Motivated by the emergence of highly...

This paper investigates the effects of mergers on the product mix of multiproduct firms. Thus, we open the black box of post-merger efficiency improvements to reveal a new margin of adjustment along the product dimension. We analyze horizontal mergers in a theoretical model where oligopolistic...

It is almost common knowledge that foreign trade in Europe is characterized by an acceptance of prices set by the world market. Coupled with a constant profit share in domestic sectors this makes European exports vulnerable to vagaries of international demand and prices as well as to crowding...

We use transaction-level US import data to compare firms from virtually all countries in the world competing in a single destination market. Guided by a simple theoretical framework, we decompose countries' market shares into the contribution of the number of firm-products, their average...

We use transaction-level data to study changes in the concentration of US imports. Concentration has fallen in the typical industry, while it is stable by industry and country of origin. The fall in concentration is driven by the extensive margin: the number of exporting firm has grown, and the...

We measure the "new" gains from trade reaped by Canada as a result of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA). We think of the "new" gains from trade of a country as all welfare effects pertaining to changes in the set of firms serving that country as emphasized in the so-called "new" trade...

In his seminal paper, starting from the premise that productivity is heterogeneous across firms, Melitz (2003) nicely accounts for the stylized fact that the level of individual productivity is key in determining the capability of a firm to export. In this paper we build a model along Melitz's...