The theory of the firm suggests that firms can respond to poor contract enforcement by vertically integrating their production process. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether firms' integration opportunities affect the way contract enforcement institutions determine international trade...

This paper first investigates the pattern of trade and industrial productivity in the ASEAN, China, and India (ACI). By using highly disaggregated COMTRADE data during 1998-2008, I find that the ACI countries exhibit significant productivity growth in manufacturing sectors. Both international...

A deranged publisher decided to produce a volume of some of my papers and asked me to write some comments. Since these amount to a summary of my views about international trade theory over the latest forty years or so, I'm giving the comments a separate alternative existence as a discussion paper

Gravity estimation based on sector-level trade data is generally misspecified because it ignores the role of product-level comparative advantage in shaping the effects of trade barriers on sector-level trade flows. Using a model that allows for arbitrary patterns of product-level comparative...

In models of pure theory of international trade, no unique production structure is dominant. By grafting a specific factor structure onto a Heckscher-Ohlin framework, in a hybrid general equilibrium production model, this paper presents theoretical results with implications such as: (a) the...

A striking pattern in transaction-level data is the concentration of international shipments in the hands of a few large firms. One common feature of dominating high-performance firms is that they produce multiple products and ship them to many destinations. Motivated by the emergence of highly...

Multi-sector variants of standard gravity models typically predict much larger gains from trade than their one-sector counterparts. This paper explores to what extent this result is due to the relevant cross-sector variation observed in trade elasticity and to what extent it is instead an...

We extend structural gravity models of bilateral trade flows to oligopolistic competition. We show that conventional gravity estimates do not only reflect trade costs but also market power. Our simple estimation procedure generalizes the standard gravity model and disentangles exogenous trade...

Borders have a sizable negative impact on trade flows. Given the vast number of individual goods potentially traded, this border effect could have two possible explanations: (1) less international than domestic trade in the goods that are actually traded between countries (flow), or (2)...