Research notes
Published papers on trade, finance, migration and knowledge whose replication data sits in a public archive. Each note states the question the authors asked, what they found, and what this platform's own data can add to it — including, where it applies, that it can add nothing.
When a poor country gains access to a rich market, do its workers move into better jobs?
Brian McCaig, Nina Pavcnik (2018) · American Economic Review 108(7)
McCaig and Pavcnik study the 2001 US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement, which sharply cut US tariffs on Vietnamese goods. They find the share of Vietnamese...
TradeAs a country gets deeper into global supply chains, does it capture more of the value or less?
Hiau Looi Kee, Heiwai Tang (2016) · American Economic Review 106(6)
The expectation is that joining supply chains means assembling other people's components, so domestic content falls. Kee and Tang show China went the other...
TradeDoes trading more make a country richer, or do rich countries simply trade more?
James Feyrer (2019) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11(4)
Feyrer revisits one of the hardest questions in the field. Frankel and Romer used geography as an instrument for trade and found a positive effect on...
TradeWhen a tariff changes, how long does trade take to respond — and does the usual estimate capture it?
Christoph Boehm, Andrei Levchenko, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar (2023) · American Economic Review 113(4)
Boehm, Levchenko and Pandalai-Nayar exploit an overlooked source of clean variation: when a country changes its Most Favoured Nation tariff, partners...
TradeHow much of a manufactured good is made outside the country that sells it?
Marcel P. Timmer et al. (2014) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 28(2)
Timmer and co-authors decompose final manufacturing goods into all the labour and capital used to make them, wherever it sat, using the World Input-Output...
TradeHow much is a trade agreement worth even when it does not cut a single tariff?
Kyle Handley, Nuno Limão (2017) · American Economic Review 107(9)
Handley and Limão argue that agreements have value by removing the threat of future protection, which changes whether firms invest in entering a market at...
TradeWho actually paid for the 2018 US tariffs, and what did they do to the pattern of trade?
Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, David E. Weinstein (2019) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(4)
Amiti, Redding and Weinstein find that the 2018 tariffs were passed through almost completely into the prices US importers paid: the cost fell on US firms...
TradeWhen two countries trade with each other and neither is the United States, whose currency is the price in?
Gita Gopinath et al. (2020) · American Economic Review 110(3)
Gopinath and co-authors propose a dominant currency paradigm: most trade is invoiced in dollars regardless of who is buying and selling, prices are sticky...
TradeWhen a country exports more, is it more firms exporting or the same firms exporting more?
Ana M. Fernandes et al. (2023) · Journal of International Economics
The answer decides which trade model is right and how large the gains from trade are. Krugman's benchmark puts all variation on the intensive margin —...
TradeWhat makes a country reach for a tariff when it has promised not to?
Chad P. Bown, Meredith A. Crowley (2013) · American Economic Review 103(2)
Bagwell and Staiger's theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts that new protection rises with imports, rises when import demand and export supply are...
TradeWhen a country exports, how much of the value was actually made there — and how far does the usual export statistic mislead us?
Robert C. Johnson (2014) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 28(2)
Johnson shows that because production is split across supply chains, gross exports overstate what a country actually contributes. He puts the gap between...
TradeWhat is a day of shipping time worth?
David L. Hummels, Georg Schaur (2013) · American Economic Review 103(7)
Hummels and Schaur model the exporter's choice between fast expensive air freight and slow cheap ocean freight, and use US import data to back out what...
TradeWhen two large economies tax each other's goods, who else gains?
Pablo Fajgelbaum et al. (2024) · American Economic Review: Insights 6(2)
Fajgelbaum, Goldberg, Kennedy, Khandelwal and Taglioni find the US-China trade war created net export opportunities rather than merely diverting existing...
Where a note says the data is behind a login, that is openICPSR, which refuses non-browser requests. Those notes rest on the published abstract and on our own observations, never on files we could not open.