International transactions are costly because they require investments in logistics, contracts, and the acquisition of local institutional knowledge. We posit that a portion of the fixed costs of entering a specific export market can be used toward costs of acquiring imports from that same...

This paper presents an analysis of the effect of China's entry into the WTO on the quality choices of Chinese exporters in terms of their outputs and their inputs. Using highly disaggregated firm-level data, we show that the quality upgrading made possible by China's tariff reductions was...

This paper presents theory and evidence from highly disaggregated Chinese data that tariff reductions induce a country's producers to upgrade the quality of the goods that they export. The paper first documents two stylized facts regarding the effect of trade liberalization on export prices and...

Modern trade models attribute the dispersion of international prices to physical and man-made barriers to trade, to the pricing-to-market by heterogeneous producers, and to differences in the quality of output offered by firms. This paper analyzes a quantitative general equilibrium model that...

Modern trade models attribute the dispersion of international prices to physical and man-made barriers to trade, to the pricing-to-market by heterogeneous producers and to differences in the quality of output offered by firms. This paper presents a tractable general equilibrium model that...