"We establish the following stylized facts: (1) Exports are characterized by Big Hits, (2) the Big Hits change from one period to the next, and (3) these changes are not explained by global factors like global commodity prices. These conclusions are robust to excluding extractable products (oil...

The authors systematically document remarkably high degrees of concentration in manufacturing exports for a sample of 151 countries over a range of 3,000 products. For every country manufacturing exports are dominated by a few "big hits" which account for most of the export value and where the...

"Good institutional quality (function) and similar institutional design (form) can promote international trade by reducing transactions costs. The authors evaluate the relative importance of function versus form in a gravity model, using an indicator of different legal systems as a proxy for...

"We propose a theory that rising globalization and rising wage inequality are related because trade liberalization raises the demand for highly competitive skill-intensive firms. In our model, only the lowest-cost firms participate in the global economy exactly along the lines of Melitz (2003)....

Using administrative employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007, we show that the labor market in France has polarized: employment shares of high and low wage occupations have grown, while middle wage occupations have shrunk. During the same period, the share of...