The empirical relationship between trade protection and economic growth is surprisingly fragile, as shown in a number of other papers. After demonstrating this empirical sensitivity, we address one possible explanation for these findings: that the relationship is nonlinear. Following the...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of willingness to take risks on the likelihood of being an entrepreneur. We use a quarter-century of data on second-generation Americans from Current Population Surveys in conjunction with country-level measures of willingness to take risks from the...

We propose a multi-country model with occupational choice, heterogeneous firms, unemployment, and revenue-generating tariffs to study the aggregate and distributional consequences of tariff wars in a unified framework. Motivated by the 2018 global tariff war, we calibrate the model to fit a...

Exploiting variation in exposure to Chinese import growth across U.S. local markets, I investigate the effects of import competition on self-employment between 1990 and 2014. I find Chinese import competition had negative effects on self-employment during the 1990s. However, the negative effects...

This paper investigates the impact of unskilled workers' earnings on crime. Following the literature on wage inequality and skill-biased technological change, we employ CPS data to create state-year as well as state-year-and (broad) industry specific measures of skill-biased technological...

This paper develops a fully-endogenous, variety-expansion growth model with firm-specific quality heterogeneity, limit pricing, and an endogenous distribution of markups. Trade induces only firms with high-quality products to export, whereas firms with low-quality products serve only the...

This paper develops a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms to study the interaction between technology adoption and trade in a world of two countries facing different technology adoption costs. It shows that a reduction in the technology adoption cost in one country increases...