The United States and China are among the world's largest trading nations. They serve as the destination and source of the world's largest flows of foreign direct investment, and they participate in regional economic arrangements on trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region and other parts...

Services trade continues to be the most dynamic part of world trade, and service sectors have long been the largest destination of foreign direct investment flows. Countries can reap huge potential gains through greater liberalization of services trade and investment, including increased job...

The service sector is large and growing. Additionally, international trade in services is growing rapidly. Yet there is a dearth of empirical research on the size, scope and potential impact of services trade. The underlying source of this gap is well-known—official statistics on the service...

Commentators, including Princeton University's Alan Blinder, estimate 40 million jobs could be at risk of being offshored over the next 20 years and suggest American workers should specialize in services that can be delivered face-to-face. In contrast, Jensen and Kletzer expect the process of...

We examine the relationship between import competition from low wage countries and the reallocation of US manufacturing from 1977 to 1997. Both employment and output growth are slower for plants that face higher levels of low wage import competition in their industry. As a result, US...

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 US trade statistics to provide a broad overview of...

This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in US 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 and...

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...

This paper provides an integrated view of globally engaged US firms by exploring a newly developed dataset that links US international trade transactions to longitudinal data on US enterprises. These data permit examination of a number of new dimensions of firm activity, including how many...

We develop a new empirical approach to identify tradable service activities. Contrary to conventional views of service activities as nontradable, we find a significant number of service industries and occupations that appear tradable and substantial employment in these tradable activities....