Publications
Russian Counter-Sanctions and Smuggling: Forensics with Structural Gravity Estimation (Journal of International Economics: 152 (2024), 104014) (with John Romalis)
Oligopoly and Oligopsony in International Trade (with Luca Macedoni) Canadian Journal of Economics: 2024, 57(2), 401-429
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
Input Complementarity and Spatial Organization of Firms (Revise and Resubmit in International Economic Review) (with Edwin Jiang)
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 input-output and other industry-level data from the United States to estimate the model for 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 Xuetao Shi and Xinbei Zhou)
The gravity equation is the most widely used empirical framework in international trade and is typically estimated using either Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) or Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML), with the latter o ering robustness to heteroskedasticity in the error term. We show that when trade elasticities vary across country pairs, OLS and PPML estimates recover fundamentally di erent objects: OLS estimates the average elasticity, while PPML estimates the elasticity of the average. We develop a formal test for coe cient heterogeneity and demonstrate that the divergence between OLS and PPML estimates is largely attributable to this difference in intepretation rather than misspecification alone. In addition, we propose a novel weighted PPML (WPPML) estimator designed to recover the elasticity of the average in the presence of heterogeneous trade shocks.
Firms in Product Space: Adoption, Growth, and Competition (Under Review) (with Luca Macedoni and John Morrow)
Which products are potentially produced together? When demand for a product increases, which firms will supply it? Using multi-product production patterns within and across firms, we recover a continuous cost-based distance between firms and unproduced products. Higher product distance implies decreasing adoption frequency. When export demand induces domestic product adoption, closer firms provide this supply. Potential costs imply measures of Revenue and Competition Potential. These predict firm sales and scope growth. If all firms produced all products linked by co-production, consumer welfare could increase by 16-30% under constant markups, rising to 46-86% under variable markups.
