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Working Paper
Gains from Trade: Does Sectoral Heterogeneity Matter?
This paper assesses the quantitative importance of including sectoral heterogeneity in computing the gains from trade. Our framework draws from Caliendo and Parro (2015) and Alvarez and Lucas (2007) and has sectoral heterogeneity along five dimensions, including the elasticity of trade to trade costs, the value-added share, and the input-output structure. The key parameter we estimate is the sectoral trade elasticity, and we use the Simonovska and Waugh (2014) simulated method of moments estimator with micro price data. Our estimates range from 2.97 to 8.94, considerably lower than those ...
Working Paper
The role of direct flights in trade costs
The role of direct flights in trade costs is investigated by introducing and using a micro price data set on 49 goods across 433 international cities covering 114 countries. It is shown that having at least one direct flight reduces trade costs by about 1,400 miles in distance equivalent terms, while an international border increases trade costs by about 14,907 miles; hence, the positive effects of having at least one direct flight between any two cities can compensate for about 10% of the negative effects of an average international border. Trade costs also decrease with the number of direct ...
Working Paper
A model of international cities: implications for real exchange rates
We develop a model of cities each inhabited by two agents, one specializing in manufacturing, the other in retail distribution. The distribution sector represents the physical transformation of all internationally traded goods from the factory gate to the final consumer. Using a panel of micro-prices at the city level, we decompose the cross-sectional variance of long-run LOP deviations into the fraction due to distribution costs, trade costs and a residual. For the median good, trade costs account for 50 percent of the variance, distribution costs account for 10 percent with 40 percent of ...
Working Paper
Gravity Channels in Trade
Gravity variables such as distance, adjacency, colony, free trade agreements or language are used to capture the effects of trade costs in empirical studies. By using actual data on trade costs, this paper decomposes the overall effects of such variables on trade into those through three gravity channels: duties/tariffs (DC), transportation costs (TC), and dyadicpreferences (PC). When PC is ignored as is typical in existing studies in the literature, it is shown that nearly all gravity effects are due to distance, 29 percent through DC and 71 percent through TC. The tables turn as the ...
Working Paper
Unifying Macro Elasticities in International Economics
International trade studies have higher macro (Armington) elasticity measures compared to international finance studies. This observation has evoked not only mixed policy implications regarding tariffs and exchange rates but also mixed welfare gains from trade. Regarding the policy implications, this so-called international elasticity puzzle is solved in this paper by distinguishing between elasticities of substitution and price elasticities of demand that are connected to each other through expenditure shares. It is shown theoretically and confirmed empirically that the macro elasticity in ...
Working Paper
Domestic vs. International Welfare Gains from Trade
Using varieties of a rich model that considers sectoral heterogeneity and input-output linkages, this paper shows that the overall welfare gains of a region within a country can be decomposed into domestic versus international welfare gains from trade. Empirical results based on state-level data from the U.S. suggest that about 91 percent of the overall welfare gains of a state are due to domestic trade with other states, on average across alternative model specifications, with a range between 72 percent and 99 percent across states. When national-level data are used for the U.S., ...
Working Paper
Trade partner diversification and growth: how trade links matter
We use network centrality measures to capture the trade partner diversification (TPD) of countries as revealed by their position in the international trade network. These measures are shown to enter long-run growth regressions positively and significantly, on top of trade openness and other control variables. Historical evidence based on threshold analyses shows that countries can use their trade networks to compensate for their low levels of financial depth, high levels of inflation, and low levels of human capital. This result is important especially for developing economies where, on ...
Working Paper
Oil shocks through international transport costs: evidence from U.S. business cycles
The effects of oil shocks on output volatility through international transport costs are investigated in an open-economy DSGE model. Two versions of the model, with and without international transport costs, are structurally estimated for the U.S. economy by a Bayesian approach for moving windows of ten years. For model selection, the posterior odds ratios of the two versions are compared for each ten-year window. The version with international transport costs is selected during periods of high volatility in crude oil prices. The contribution of international transport costs to the volatility ...