Imported capital goods, which embody skill-complementary technologies, can increase the supply of skills in developing countries. Focusing on China and using a shift-share design, we show that city-level capital goods import growth increases the local skill share and that both skill acquisition...

Imported capital goods, which embody skill-complementary technologies, can increase the supply of skills in developing countries. Focusing on China and using a shift-share design, we show that city-level capital goods import growth increases the local skill share and that both skill acquisition...

Domestic trade costs imply more restricted access to consumption goods in small and remote cities. By eliminating the fixed costs of firm entry and reducing the effects of distance on trade costs, e-commerce can disproportionately improve these cities' access to varieties of consumption goods...

Government subsidies to the manufacturing sector are popular in developing countries. This paper studies the long-run effects of a large-scale regional industrialization campaign in China, known as the “Third Front" (TF) construction. Motivated by national defense considerations, the TF...

We develop a quantitative-oriented model that integrates the production and financing decisions of multinational corporations (MNCs). Firms can deploy their technology for production overseas and become MNCs. Due to frictions in obtaining external finance, the scale of the affiliates partially...

One of the explanations for global imbalances is the self-financing behavior of credit-constrained firms in rapidly growing emerging markets. We use an extensive firm-level data set from several Asian countries during 2002–2011, and test the micro foundation of this theory by estimating the...

A key input to quantitative evaluations of transport infrastructure projects is their impact on transport costs. We propose a new method of estimating this impact relying on widely accessible customs data: by using the route choice of exporters. We combine our method with a spatial equilibrium...