Publications

Multinational firms (MNEs) dominate trade flows, yet their global production decisions are often ignored in firm-level studies of exporting and importing.  Using newly merged data on US firms' trade and multinational activity by country, we show that MNEs...

We present an economic rationale for countries resorting to foreign influence to export their ideology to other nations. Our model incorporates two fundamental elements: redistribution of the tax burden between capital owners and workers, and...

The importance of time in production was emphasized by Classical economists and was at the core of the Austrian capital theory proposed by Böhm-Bawerk and further elaborated by Wicksell, Hicks, Dorfman, and many others. A central concept in this...

The field of international trade has undergone significant theoretical and empirical advancements over the last twenty-five years. A key breakthrough has been the emergence of firm-level approaches to studying exporting, importing, and global value chains...

Import tariffs tend to be higher on final goods than inputs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as tariff escalation. Despite its salience, existing trade policy results do not predict that tariff escalation increases social welfare. We show that tariff...

We develop a model of export-platform foreign direct investment (FDI) in which final goods are produced only with labor and there are no fixed costs of exporting. We derive a simple condition that determines whether an MNE's plants are substitutes or...

We propose a theory of the relationship between globalization and pandemics. We start by documenting the importance of international trade for the diffusion of infections in several pandemics throughout history. We also show that trade is closely...

This paper develops a framework to study the interplay between world trade and interest rates. The model incorporates an explicit notion of time and of production length, along the lines of the 'Austrian' tradition of Bohm-Bawerk (1889). Changes in the...

This paper surveys the recent body of work in economics on the importance of global value chains (GVCs) in shaping international trade flows and multinational activity. On the empirical front, we begin reviewing several variants of the "macro approach" to...

We exploit plausibly exogenous geographical variation in the reduction in domestic demand caused by the Great Recession in Spain to document the existence of a robust, within-firm negative causal relationship between demand-driven changes in domestic...

This paper evaluates the extent to which the world economy has entered a phase of de-globalisation, and it offers some speculative thoughts on the future of global value chains in the post-COVID-19 age. Although the growth of international trade flows...

This article offers an overview of some key conceptual aspects associated with the rise of global value chains (GVCs). It outlines a series of alternative interpretations and definitions of what the rise of GVCs entails, and it traces the implications of...