In this paper, we estimate the benefits to countries that purchase goods from China by having access to intermediary services provided in Hong Kong. Traders in Hong Kong supply information on markets and producers in China, which provides welfare gains to foreign firms using these services....

The latest World Bank estimates of real GDP per capita for China are significantly lower than previous ones. We review possible sources of this puzzle and conclude that it reflects a combination of factors, including substitution bias in consumption, reliance on urban prices which we estimate...

This paper offers an explanation for the persistence observed in real exchange rate movements. The model combines pricing to market behavior with sticky prices generated by staggered contracts. A translog preference structure is used to enhance both features. The paper finds that openness limits...

We study outsourcing from the United States under the offshore assembly program (OAP). Formerly called the 806/807 provision of the U.S. tariff code, and now renamed the 9802 provision of the Harmonized System code, this program allows U.S. firms to export component parts and have them assembled...

The last few decades have seen a spectacular integration of the global economy through trade. The rising integration of world markets has brought with it a disintegration of the production process, however, as manufacturing or services activities done abroad are combined with those performed at...

The goal of this paper is to theoretically and empirically demonstrate the consequences of different imputation methods, using recent data from the International Price Program. We suppose that prices are missing due to random or erratic reporting. We consider three different imputation methods:...

This paper argues that the theoretical foundations for the gravity equation are general, while the empirical performance of the gravity equation is specific to the type of goods examined. Most existing theory for the gravity equation depends on the assumption of differentiated goods. We show...

The authors study the link between export product variety and country productivity based on data from 34 industrial and developing countries, from 1982 to 1997. They measure export product variety by the share of U.S. imports on the set of goods exported by each sampled country relative to the...

Product variety plays an important role in the theoretical work on monopolistic competition and trade, and recent empirical work has begun to quantify this for aggregate and disaggregate import demands. The authors discuss the measurement of product variety in trade, using a broad cross-section...