A large literature has shown that geographic frictions reduce trade, but has not clarified precisely why. We provide insights into why such frictions matter by examining which parts of trade these frictions reduce most. Using data that tracks manufacturers' shipments within the United States on...

Wolf (2000) demonstrates that trade within the U.S. appears substantially impeded by state borders. We revisit this finding with improved data. We show that much intra-national home bias can be explained by wholesaling activity. Shipments by wholesalers are much more localized within states than...

We show that 'home bias' in trade patterns will arise endogenously due to the co-location decisions of intermediate and final goods producers. Our model identifies four implications of home bias arising out of specialized industrial demands. Regions absorb different bundles of goods. Buyers and...

This study uses cross-county variation in support for 46 ballot measures to identify political subcultures in South Dakota and to study them. A hierarchical clustering method applied to county-level election returns allows the identification of subcultures at various levels of granularity. We...

We note that calibration parameters in a multi-country Armington trade model play a role similar to that of econometric residuals: they allow the model to fit the data exactly. We use this premise to evaluate the "fit" of a standard multi-country computable general-equilibrium model. We find...