Firm-level idiosyncratic policy distortions misallocate resources between firms, lowering aggregate productivity. Many environmental policies create such distortions; in particular, output-based intensity standards (which limit firms' energy use or emissions per unit of output) are easier for...

Firm-level idiosyncratic policy distortions lower aggregate productivity, especially if such distortions are correlated with firm productivity. Many environmental policies, such as energy intensity standards, exhibit this correlation. In contrast to the existing environmental literature...

International trade increases productivity; internal trade should too. The size and consequences of internal trade barriers are unfortunately not well known. Using unique Canadian data and multiple approaches to measure trade costs, we find internal trade barriers are large, especially for poor...

Like trade between countries, trade within countries is costly; unlike between countries, gains from trade within countries depend on migration and taxes, as gains through higher wages have tax consequences that gains through lower prices do not. We confirm the first point and flexibly measure...

International trade and the internal movement of goods and people are closely related. China – increasingly open and with massive internal migration flows – provides an ideal setting to study these interrelationships. We develop a general equilibrium model of internal and external...

Online appendix for the Review of Economic Dynamics article

In this paper we measure the distortions in the allocation of labor and capital across provinces and sectors in China for the period 1985-2007. Most existing studies have measured factor market distortions by using some index of dispersion in individual factor returns. However, the map between...

Agriculture in poor countries has low productivity, high employment, and negligible trade flows relative to other sectors. These facts motivate a multi-sector, open-economy view of international productivity differences. With a quantitative multi-country model featuring nonhomothetic...

Does trade within a country affect welfare and productivity? What are the magnitude and consequences of costs to such trade? To answer these questions, we exploit unique Canadian data to measure internal trade costs in a variety of ways – they are large, and vary across sectors and...

Disclosure programs exist in many industries in which consumers are poorly informed about product quality. We study a disclosure program for airline on-time performance, which ranks airlines based on the fraction of their flights that arrive less than 15 minutes late. The program creates...