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Working Paper
Trade and the (dis)incentive to reform labor markets: the case of reform in the European Union.
In a closed economy general equilibrium model, Hopenhayn and Rogerson (1993) find large welfare gains to removing firing restrictions. We explore the extent to which international trade alters this result. When economies trade, labor market policies in one country spill over to other countries through a change in the terms of trade. This reduces the incentive to reform labor markets. In a policy game over firing taxes between countries, we find that countries optimally choose positive levels of firing taxes. A coordinated elimination of firing taxes yields considerable benefits. This insight ...
Journal Article
The exchange rate: what's in it for prices?
Large movements in the exchange rate are quite common, and they substantially alter one's purchasing power when traveling abroad. Yet these exchange rate movements tend to have a smaller impact on the price of foreign goods that are imported. Following an appreciation of the euro against the dollar, European firms selling products to American firms for import do not raise their prices by nearly as much as the prices they charge consumers in the European market. Similarly, American firms sell their products at higher prices in Europe than at home. This incomplete, or partial, pass-through of ...
Working Paper
Do sunk costs of exporting matter for net export dynamics?
Not all firms export every period. Firms enter and exit foreign markets. Previous research has suggested that these export participation decisions have significant aggregate implications. In particular, it has been argued that these export decisions are important for the comovements of net exports and the real exchange rate. In this paper, the authors evaluate these predictions in a general equilibrium environment. Specifically, assuming that firms face an up-front, sunk cost of entering foreign markets and a smaller period-by-period continuation cost, they derive the discrete entry and exit ...
Working Paper
Consumer search, price dispersion, and international relative price volatility
This paper develops a model of consumer search consistent with the evidence of substantial price dispersion within countries. This model is used to study international relative price fluctuations. Consumer search frictions permit firms to price discriminate across markets based on the local wage of consumers. With price dispersion, the market price of a good does not measure its resource cost. This breaks the tight link between relative quantities and relative prices implied by most models. We show that volatile and persistent fluctuations in relative wages lead to volatile and persistent ...
Working Paper
Export dynamics in large devaluations
We study the source and consequences of sluggish export dynamics in emerging markets following large devaluations. We document two main features of exports that are puzzling for standard trade models. First, given the change in relative prices, exports tend to grow gradually following a devaluation. Second, high interest rates tend to suppress exports. To address these features of export dynamics, we embed a model of endogenous export participation due to sunk and per period export costs into an otherwise standard small open economy. In response to shocks to productivity, the interest rate, ...
Working Paper
Do falling iceberg costs explain recent U.S. export growth?
We study empirically and theoretically the growth of U.S. manufacturing exports from 1987 to 2007. We identify the change in iceberg costs with plant-level data on the intensity of exporting by exporters. Given this change in iceberg costs, we find that a GE model with heterogeneous establishments and a sunk cost of starting to export is consistent with both aggregate U.S. export growth and the changes in the number and size of U.S. exporters. The model also captures the non-linear dynamics of U.S. export growth. A model without a sunk export cost generates substantially less trade growth and ...
Working Paper
The great trade collapse of 2008-2009: an inventory adjustment?
This paper examines the role of inventories in the decline of production, trade, and expenditures in the US in the economic crisis of late 2008 and 2009. Empirically, the authors show that international trade declined more drastically than trade-weighted production or absorption and there was a sizeable inventory adjustment. This is most clearly evident for autos, the industry with the largest drop in trade. However, relative to the magnitude of the US downturn, these movements in trade are quite typical. The authors develop a two-country general equilibrium model with endogenous inventory ...
Journal Article
The great trade collapse (and recovery)
The collapse and rebound in U.S. international trade from 2008 to 2010 was quite stunning. Over this period, the fluctuations in international trade were bigger than the fluctuations in either production of or expenditures on traded goods. These relatively large fluctuations in international trade were surprising to some, since international trade had been growing at a very fast pace for quite a long time. They were equally surprising for trade theorists, since these movements in trade arise in standard models of international trade only when the costs of international trade rise and fall ...
Working Paper
Do falling iceberg costs explain recent U.S. export growth?
Superseded by Working Paper 12-20 ; The authors study the rise in U.S. manufacturing exports from 1987 to 2002 through the lens of a monopolistically competitive model with heterogeneous producers and sunk costs of exporting. Using the model, they infer that iceberg costs fell nearly 27 percent in this period. Given this change in iceberg costs, the authors use the model to calculate the predicted increase in trade. Contrary to the findings in Yi (2003), they find that the exports should have grown an additional 70 percent (78.7 vs. 46.4). The model overpredicts export growth partly because ...
Working Paper
Establishment heterogeneity, exporter dynamics, and the effects of trade liberalization
The authors study the effects of tariffs in a dynamic variation of the Melitz (2003) model, a monopolistically competitive model with heterogeneity in productivity across establishments and fixed costs of exporting. With fixed costs of starting to export that are on average 3.7 times as large as the costs incurred to continue as an exporter, the model can match both the size distribution of exporters and annual transition in and out of exporting among US manufacturing establishments. The authors find that the tariff equivalent of these fixed costs is nearly 30 percentage points. They use the ...