This paper provides intangible trade data for an important U.S. export industry during a period when official data are very thin. It examines what modes firms use to export intangible assets. It uses a novel data source that provides very detailed information on export modal choice and market entry costs. Motion picture exporters use different modes of entry across markets. Exporters use more i...

Trade costs have fallen surprisingly little given the large increase in international trade in the last 50 years. This paper examines whether trade costs are properly measured. I show theoretically that trade weighted measures will underestimate the changes in trade costs when there are fixed market entry costs and quality differences. Newly traded goods enter at higher trade costs than previou...

The world trade collapsed in the most recent recession. Some analysts have suggested the increasing offshoring of the supply chain, or vertical specialization (VS) trade, can explain the apparent increase in volatility of trade over the business cycle. This paper develops a model of VS trade to examine its impact on the volatility of trade. The model features increased trade volatility as VS tr...

In this paper, we use detailed trade and transactions data for the U.S. manufacturing sector to empirically analyze the direction and magnitude of the association between firm-level exposure to trade and the volatility of employment growth. We find that, relative to purely domestic firms, firms that only export and firms that both export and import are less volatile, whereas firms that only imp...

According to the Porter-Hypothesis (PH) stricter environmental regulations in one country may trigger innovations in that country, which may partially or more than fully offset the compliance costs of domestic firms, thus possibly improving their international competitiveness. This paper investigates whether conditions exist under which this Hypothesis is valid either in its weak form (partiall...

This paper documents patterns in international trade costs in processed foods for a large cross-section of developing and developed countries, during the 1976-2000 period. A trade costs index is inferred from a micro-founded gravity equation that incorporates bilateral ‘iceberg’ trade costs. For 2000, the weighted average tariff equivalent of trade costs ranges from 73% for the North to 134% fo...

A Hall type model that includes intermediate materials in the production function and allows for non-stochastic time variation in the contribution of technical change to output growth is used to estimate markup and returns to scale for eight Australian manufacturing industries at approximately the two-digit level, during the period 197172 to 1984-85. Six of the eight manufacturing industries in...

This paper examines how the patterns of India’s food consumption have been changing in recent times in line with her faster economic growth and generally rising affluence levels. The study, also, presents evidence on the nutritional implications of these changes to reinforce some of the findings on the observed changes in the food consumption patterns. A decline in agricultural, particularly fo...

Vertical specialization (VS) trade, trade in goods that incorporate imported inputs, has grown rapidly since the 1960s. While the share of trade in inputs has not increased, the types of inputs traded have shifted from raw materials to manufactured parts. I argue that declining trade costs are an important explanation for these facts. I present a three stage vertical specialization trade model,...

This paper sheds light on the product cycle and neotechnology theories of trade in the context of generic pharmaceuticals. The paper studies the export performance of 177 Indian pharmaceutical firms for the post-liberalization period 1991-2004. The results indicate that technology proxied by foreign patent rights has a positive impact on exports. This suggests that developing countries with inn...