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Working Paper
Structural Change and Global Trade
Services, which are less traded than goods, rose from 50 percent of world expenditure in 1970 to 80 percent in 2015. Such structural change restrained "openness"?the ratio of world trade to world GDP?over this period. We quantify this with a general equilibrium trade model featuring non-homothetic preferences and input-output linkages. Openness would have been 70 percent in 2015, 23 percentage points higher than the data, if expenditure patterns were unchanged from 1970. Structural change is critical for estimating the dynamics of trade barriers and welfare gains from trade. Ongoing ...
Working Paper
Structural Change and Global Trade
Services, which are less traded than goods, rose from 58 percent of world expenditure in 1970 to 79 percent in 2015. Using a Ricardian trade model incorporating endogenous structural change, we quantify how this substantial shift in consumption has affected trade. Without structural change, we find that the world trade to GDP ratio would be 15 percentage points higher by 2015, about half the boost delivered from declining trade costs. In addition, this structural change has lowered the global welfare gains from trade integration by almost 40 percent over the past four decades. Absent further ...
Newsletter
The increasing importance of services expenditures and the dampening effect on global trade
Globalization, particularly through international trade in goods, has helped to foster the creation of tremendous amounts of wealth and prosperity across much of the globe while lifting sizable portions of the world’s population out of poverty. In particular, the latter half of the twentieth century delivered unprecedented rates of increased economic integration among many countries. Access to global markets supported the industrialization of emerging economies and opened up new markets for firms in wealthier countries. As a result of the expansion of international trade and competition, ...
Working Paper
Learning and the Value of Trade Relationships
This paper quantifies the value of importer-exporter relationships. We show that almost 80 percent of U.S. imports take place in pre-existing relationships, with sizable heterogeneity across countries, and show that traded quantities and survival increase as relationships age. We develop a two-country general equilibrium trade model with learning that is consistent with these facts. A model-based measure of relationship value explains survival during the 2008-09 crisis. Knowledge accumulated within long-term relationships is quantitatively important: wiping out all memory from previous ...
Working Paper
Estimating Unequal Gains across U.S. Consumers with Supplier Trade Data
Using supplier-level trade data, we estimate the effect on consumer welfare from changes in U.S. imports both in the aggregate and for different household income groups from 1998 to 2014. To do this, we use consumer preferences which feature non-homotheticity both within sectors and across sectors. After structurally estimating the parameters of the model, using the universe of U.S. goods imports, we construct import price indexes in which a variety is defined as a foreign establishment producing an HS10 product that is exported to the United States. We find that lower income households ...