We show that the US in-bond system of imports may be used by firms to illegally avoid trade barriers, a practice known as in-bond diversion.  Digging into official Chinese and Mexican trade statistics, we uncover traces of US quota-hopping in-bond diversion by Chinese exports of textiles and...

During the final years of the Multifiber Agreement the US imposed strict import quotas on Chinese apparel while it gave African apparel duty-and quota-free access.  The combination of these policies led to a rapid but ephemeral rise of African exports.  In this paper we argue that the African...

During the final years of the Multifiber Agreement the US imposed strict import quotas on Chinese apparel while it gave African apparel duty- and quota-free access. The combination of these policies led to a rapid but ephemeral rise of African exports. In this paper we argue that the African...

During the final years of the Multifiber Agreement (2001–2005) the US imposed quotas on Chinese apparel while it gave African apparel duty- and quota-free access. We argue that the combination of these policies led to a rapid but ephemeral rise of African exports that can be explained in part...

Foreign direct investment may play an important role in transferring technologies from high-income to emerging economies, which can lead to uneven effects on the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. This paper combines project-level data on greenfield foreign direct investment with household...

We provide cogent evidence for the causal pro-trade effect of migrants and in doing so establish an important link between migrant networks and long-run economic development.  To this end, we exploit a unique event in human history, the exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People to the US.  This...

This paper compares the impact of distance, a standard proxy for trade costs, on eBay and offline international trade flows. It considers the same set of 62 countries and the same basket of goods for both types of transactions, and finds the effect of distance to be on average 65 percent smaller...

This paper examines the trade and trade-induced welfare effects of high oil prices. Using a gravity model of trade we find that the distance elasticity of trade significantly increases with the oil price. This suggests that high oil prices make trade less global. We estimate that an increase in...

Countries restrict the export of natural resources to lower domestic prices, stimulate downstream industries, earn rents on international markets, or on environmental grounds. This paper provides empirical evidence of evasion of such export barriers. Using tools from the illicit trade...