An Indirect Exporter is defined as a firm that sells its product to a trade intermediary in its own country, who then goes on to export the good. Despite the numerous appearances of these firms in recent theoretical models, there has been no empirical work comparing these firms to Domestic firms...

Balassa Index (Balassa 1965) is widely used in the literature to measure country-sector Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA). However, being computed on observed trade flows, it mixes up all the factors influencing trade flows. In particular, Balassa Index cannot isolate exporter-sector (ex...

This paper studies how firm-level export performance is affected by RER volatility and investigates whether this effect depends on existing financial constraints. Our empirical analysis relies on export data for more than 100,000 Chinese exporters over the period 2000-2006. We confirm a...

Trade unit values are commonly used as proxies for trade prices in empirical research in international economics. Existing datasets providing international trade unit values for a large number of countries typically suffer from a number of statistical biases, due to the aggregation of unit...

Evasion of customs duties is a serious concern in developing countries, where tariff receipts are often important, but their collection is often problematic. We study theoretically and empirically the determinants of evasion across countries and products, based on a systematic analysis of...

Methodological issues arising from the estimation of tariff equivalents of barriers to services trade are very relevant for policy. These equivalents are used extensively to compute welfare gains and resource reallocations associated with partial liberalization of the sector; any measurement...