Publications
Russian Counter-Sanctions and Smuggling: Forensics with Structural Gravity Estimation (Accepted at Journal of International Economics) (with John Romalis)
Oligopoly and Oligopsony in International Trade (Accepted at Canadian Journal of Economics) (with Luca Macedoni)
Benefit–Cost Analysis of Increased Trade: An Order-of-Magnitude Estimate of the Benefit–Cost Ratio (with James Feyrer, Benjamin Aleman-Castilla, and Brad Wong)
Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis: 2023, 1-28
Production Clustering and Offshoring, 2022 (American Economic Journal: Microeconomics: 14(3), 700-732)
An MPA Design Approach to Benefit Fisheries: Maximising Larval Export and Minimising Redundancy (with Colm Tong, Karlo Hock, Nils Krueck, and Peter Mumby)
Diversity 13 (11), 586
Working Papers
Task Complementarity and Spatial Organization of Firms (Under Review) (with Edwin Jiang) (Previously Circulated as Shadow Offshoring and Input Complementarity)
We introduce a quantifiable model of international production of a complex good that consists of multiple parts. Production of any pair of parts in the same country exhibits pair-specific cost complementarity, and consequently, decisions on production locations are interrelated, which generates rich patterns of clustering. We use the World Input-Output Database to estimate the model for the case of US production and find that these complementarity costs are highly heterogeneous across industries and, on average, account for 1.86% of total production costs. Gains from trade associated with the decrease in these costs, which we interpret as non-tariff trade liberalization, are 50% larger than in the case of a decrease in tariffs. Finally, using our model, we construct an index of international integration, that, unlike standard measures, accounts not only for the total costs of parts produced abroad but also what parts are produced and how similar these parts are to one another. We find that this index is a better predictor of the welfare consequences of trade liberalization than conventional measures of offshoring.
PPML, Gravity, and Heterogeneous Trade Elasticites (with Xinbei Zhou)
The gravity equation, the most popular empirical tool in International Trade, is usually estimated by the OLS or Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML), with PPML being robust to the heteroskedasticity of an error term. We find that when the trade elasticity is heterogeneous between country pairs, OLS and PPML estimates have different interpretations: OLS estimates the average elasticity and PPML the elasticity of the average. We show that most of the differences between the PPML and OLS estimates are explained by the difference in the interpretation of the coefficients with only 8-30% of the differences explained by the heteroskedasticity channel.
