The last two centuries witnessed the rise and fall of empires. We construct a model which rationalises this in terms of the changing trade gains from empires. In the model, empires are arrangements that reduce trade cost between an industrial metropole and the agricultural periphery. During...

How does import protection affect export performance? In trade models with scale economies, import liberalization can reduce industry-level exports by cutting domestic production. We show that this export destruction mechanism reduced US export growth following the permanent normalization of...