Alchian and Allen show that a per unit transactions cost lowers the relative price of, and raises the relative demand for, high-quality goods. We extend their theory, deriving a relationship between per unit and ad valorem trade costs and the quality composition of trade. Detailed international...

Models with constant-elasticity of substitution (CES) preferences are commonly employed in the international trade literature because they provide a tractable way to handle product differentiation in general equilibrium. However this tractability comes at the cost of generating a set of...

Not surprisingly, big countries trade more than small countries. In this paper we use data on shipments by 110 exporters to 59 importers in 5,000 product categories to ask: how? Do big countries trade larger quantities of a common set of goods (the intensive margin), a larger set of goods (the...

We model demand for quality differentiated goods to derive a relationship between trade costs and the quality composition of trade. Detailed data on traded goods' prices, quantities and shipping costs for many importers and exporters are used to test these predictions. These data provide a...