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Working Paper
How Much Will the Belt and Road Initiative Reduce Trade Costs?
This paper studies the impact of transport infrastructure projects of the Belt and Road Initiative on shipment times and trade costs. Based on a new data on completed and planned Belt and Road transport projects, Geographic Information System analysis is used to estimate shipment times before and after the Belt and Road Initiative. Two sets of data are computed to address different research questions: a global database based on an analysis of 1,000 cities in 191 countries and 47 sectors and a regional database that focuses on more granular information (1,818 cities) for Belt and Road ...
Working Paper
The Gravity of Experience
In this paper, we establish the importance of experience in international trade for reducing trade costs and facilitating bilateral trade. Within an augmented gravity framework, we find that an additional year of experience at the country-pair level reduces trade costs by 2.0% and increases bilateral exports by 8%. The effect of experience is stronger for country-pairs that are more distant, who do not share a common border, and who lack colonial and legal ties. Further, experience raises both the extensive and the intensive margins of trade. In a dynamic trade model with heterogeneous firms ...
Working Paper
Exporters of Services: A Look at U.S. Exporters Outside of the Manufacturing Sector
Using transaction data for the U.S., this paper presents a series of stylized facts on exporters in services industries. We find that most of the basic facts on manufacturing exporters extend to the services sectors with three important differences. First, the participation rate of services firms in foreign markets is much lower than that of manufacturing firms. Second, the size premia at services exporters are significantly higher than those among manufacturers. Third, the survival rates of services exporters tend to be lower than that of manufacturing exporters. All three facts are ...