Global trade and economics

International trade shapes how firms grow, how workers are paid, and how quickly economies adopt new technologies — making it one of the more consequential areas in modern economics. Researchers use firm-level data to examine how exposure to foreign competition or export markets changes productivity, innovation, and resource allocation within and across industries. A central debate concerns the direction of causality: do more productive firms self-select into exporting, or does exporting itself force firms to improve? Active work also asks how the gains from trade liberalization are distributed across workers and regions, and how differences in market size interact with technology diffusion to shape long-run economic development.

Works

239,181

Total citations

2,048,939

Keywords

International TradeProductivityTrade LiberalizationFirm-Level DataGlobalizationExporting