This paper investigates whether there is an S-Curve in Colombia using bilateral and disaggregated quarterly data for the period 1991-2014. More precisely, the short-run effects of a depreciation on the TB are analysed in 27 industries covered by the PAG Free Trade Agreement. The S-Curve found in...

Global value chains (GVCs) have grown rapidly over the past several decades. Over the same period, the aggregate value of current account imbalances has risen substantially. This paper looks at whether these developments are related. While there is a sizable literature that has documented the...

The scale of unrecorded trade across the border between Nigeria, the region’s biggest economy and market, and its francophone neighbours is particularly high. Despite providing economic incentives, informal trade entails costs, complications and sometimes risks. This paper explores how policy...

Using highly disaggregated transaction-level trade data, we document the importance of new firmlevel trade partner relationships and the addition of new products to existing relationships in driving long-run import flows. Moreover, we find that these margins are sensitive to movements in the...

How strong are strategic complementarities in price setting across firms? In this paper, we provide a direct empirical estimate of firm price responses to changes in prices of their competitors. We develop a general framework and an empirical identification strategy to estimate the elasticities...

Policy-making institutions such as the European Commission, the ECB and the OECD often use unit labor costs as a measure of international competitiveness. The goal of this paper is to examine how well this measure is related to international export performance at the firm level. To this end, we...

Exports in advanced economies have been relatively sluggish since 2011, growing at a much slower pace than observed before the global financial crisis. In this paper, export-demand equations for a panel of 18 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are...

This paper contributes to the debate on the effects of trade versus technological change on wage differentials. We propose an explanation of the stylized facts which is based on interactions between openness and technological change because of labor market institutions and government...

The main aim of this paper is to analyze US-China trade relations and the so-called "trade war" between the two countries. As a first step, we will look at the trade relations between the two countries and explain why President Trump is eagerly following a protectionist trade policy toward China...

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistical constructs in open-economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within...