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Foreign Shocks as Granular Fluctuations
This paper uses a data set covering the universe of French firm-level sales, imports, and exports over the period 1993-2007 and a quantitative multi-country model to study the international transmission of business cycle shocks at both the micro and the macro levels. The largest firms are both important enough to generate aggregate fluctuations (Gabaix 2011), and most likely to be internationally connected. This implies that foreign shocks are transmitted to the domestic economy primarily through the largest firms. We first document a novel stylized fact: larger French firms are significantly ...
Working Paper
The Evolution of Comparative Advantage: Measurement and Implications
We estimate productivities at the sector level for 72 countries and 5 decades, and examine how they evolve over time in both developed and developing countries. In both country groups, comparative advantage has become weaker: productivity grew systematically faster in sectors that were initially at greater comparative disadvantage. These changes have had a significant impact on trade volumes and patterns, and a non-negligible welfare impact. In the counterfactual scenario in which each country's comparative advantage remained the same as in the 1960s, and technology in all sectors grew at the ...
Working Paper
The global welfare impact of China: trade integration and technological change
This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of China's trade integration and technological change in a quantitative Ric a rdian-Heckscher-Ohlin model implemented on 75 countries. We simulate two alternative productivity growth scenarios: a balanced one in which China's productivity grows at the sam e rate in each sector, and an unbalanced one in which China's comparative disadvantage sectors catch up disproportionately faster to the world productivity frontier. Contrary to a well-known conjecture (Samuelson 2004), the large majority of countries in the sample, including the developed ones, ...
Working Paper
The global labor market impact of rmerging giants: a quantitative assessment
This paper investigates both aggregate and distributional impacts of the trade integration of China, India, and Central and Eastern Europe in a quantitative multi-country multi-sector model, comparing outcomes with and without factor market frictions. Under perfect within-country factor mobility, the gains to the rest of the world from trade integration of emerging giants are 0.37%, ranging from ?0.37% for Honduras to 2.28% for Sri Lanka. Reallocation of factors across sectors contributes relatively little to the aggregate gains, but has large distributional effects. The aggregate gains to ...