We find that Republican candidates lost support in the 2018 congressional election in counties more exposed to trade retaliation, but saw no commensurate electoral gains from US tariff protection. The electoral losses were driven by retaliatory tariffs on agricultural products, and were only...

This paper evaluates the influence of host-country financial conditions on the global operations of multinational firms. Using detailed U.S. data, we establish that financial development in a country is associated with relatively more entry by multinational affiliates, as well as with higher...

This paper offers four contributions to the empirical literature on global value chains (GVCs). First, we provide a succinct overview of several measures developed to capture the upstreamness or downstreamness of industries and countries in GVCs. Second, we employ data from the World...

The 2004 Global Labor Survey (GLS) is an Internet-based survey that seeks to measure de facto labor practices in countries around the world, covering issues such as freedom of association, the regulation of work contracts, employee benefits and the prevalence of collective bargaining. To find...

Global value chains have fundamentally transformed international trade and development in recent decades. We use matched firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to examine how Chinese firms position themselves in global production lines and...

This paper develops an approach for quantifying the importance of different sources of comparative advantage for country welfare, based on the Eaton and Kortum (2002) model extended to predict industry trade flows. In this framework, comparative advantage is determined by the interaction of...

We construct a tractable general equilibrium model of cumulative innovation and growth, in which new ideas strictly improve upon frontier technologies, and productivity improvements are drawn in a stochastic manner. The presence of positive knowledge spillovers implies that the decentralized...