How large are the gains from product market integration — or, equivalently, from a reduction in barriers to trade over space? This article surveys recent work on this question in the context of both international and intranational trade

The social costs of pollution and climate change hinge critically on humans’ ability to adapt. Based on transaction records from the world’s largest payment network, this research compiles daily travel flows and documents that China’s rapid expansion of high-speed railways (HSR)...

We develop a new factor content approach to study the impact of trade on inequality. Our analysis generalizes the theoretical results of Deardorff and Staiger (1988) and improves on past empirical implementations of these results. Combined with unique administrative data from Ecuador, our...

How much of the spatial distribution of economic activity today is determined by history rather than by geographic fundamentals? And if history matters for the distribution, does it also affect overall efficiency? This paper develops a tractable theoretical and empirical framework that aims to...

The social costs of pollution and climate change hinge critically on humans' ability to adapt. Based on transaction records from the world's largest payment network, this research compiles daily travel flows and documents that China's rapid expansion of high-speed railways (HSR) facilitates the...

An important but poorly understood form of firm tax evasion arises from the use of "ghost firms"--fake firms that issue fraudulent receipts so that their clients can claim false deductions. We provide a unique window into this global phenomenon using transaction-level tax data from Ecuador....

How costly is the misallocation of production that we might expect to result from distortions such as market power, incomplete contracts, taxes, regulations, or corruption? This paper develops new tools for the study of misallocation that place minimal assumptions on firms' underlying...