Published Papers 2019-23
Growth and Trade with Frictions
Latent Exports: Almost Ideal Gravity and Zeros, Review of Economics & Statistics, forthcoming
Back to the Future: Gravity at Sixty
Unpublished Papers
Abstract
U.S President Trump’s emphasis on `tariff reciprocity’ has focused public attention on relative height of tariffs as a measure of fairness in trade relations. The import weighted tariff used by USTR to rank how protectionist are trade partners is theoretic and misleading for this purpose. We propose and implement a theory-consistent tariff index that combines thousands of tariff rates into an import volume equivalent uniform tariff. The index is (i) consistent with the WTO rationale that trade relations should aim at reciprocal exchange of market access and (ii) decomposes neatly into each country’s buyer and seller incidence of tariffs.
Quantifying the Extensive Margin(s) of Trade
Commercial Rivalry as Seller Incidence Shifting: Non-parametric Accounting of the China Shock
Abstract
Intense commercial rivalry in manufacturing is quantified in this paper by novel non-parametric gravity sufficient statistics. Trade cost incidence on sellers falls with own sales while others’ seller incidence rises on average. China’s manufacturing seller incidence falls 8.2% yearly as China’s sales share quadruples over 2000-14. US seller incidence rises 6.3% yearly as US sales share halves. Industrial policy that raises US (China) 2014 sales share 10% reduces seller incidence 9.74% (10.05%). A trade elasticity equal to one closely fits non-parametric terms of trade statistics to CES gravity-predicted domestic trade shares. Trade elasticities identified off variation in observable buyer prices or trade costs are biased upward by omitted variation in unobservable buyer frictions.
Exchange Rates as Trade Frictions: Estimates and Policy Implications
Abstract
This paper improves on current treatment of exchange rate variation in quantitative trade models. Exchange rate changes with heterogeneous passthrough to buyers are embedded in the structural gravity model. Quantification on two digit annual bilateral trade data reveals real effects of exchange rate changes on producers that are substantial for some country-sector-time period observations. Real national income effects are small but not always negligible. Effective exchange Rates with Gravitas (ERGs) are introduced as theory-consistent indexes to guide potential policy remedies.
Software
software and data for gravity incidence
software to estimate gravity
software to calculate the TR