This paper proposes a new approach for enriching results for U.S. labor markets from the leading multi-regional CGE model, the GTAP model. Departing from the usual approach of expanding labor data in all economies in a model's database, our method expands only the U.S. labor data. Additionally,...

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 is a contribution to the literature on rational design of trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an incomplete contract among sovereign states. Incomplete contracts contain gaps. Ex post, contractual gaps may leave gains from trade unrealized; they may create...

This paper constitutes an attempt to reframe and eventually deflate the ongoing “compliance-vs.-rebalancing” debate which has permeated WTO scholarship for the last 10 years. At face value, this controversy circles around object and purpose of WTO enforcement and the legal nature of dispute...

We use a new US-firm-level dataset covering all domestic and international sales made through eBay, an online marketplace, to provide insights about firm heterogeneity in online international trade. One is that the share of firms that export is surprisingly high, at 85%.

Economic theory has made considerable progress in explaining why sovereign countries cooperate in trade. Central to most theories of trade cooperation are issues of self-enforcement: The threat of reprisal by an aggrieved party maintains the initial balance of concessions and prevents...

We compare the impact of distance, a standard proxy for trade costs, on eBay and offline international trade flows. We consider the same set of 62 countries and the same basket of goods for both types of transactions. We find the effect of distance to be on average 65 percent smaller on the eBay...