Working Papers

How does import protection affect export performance? In trade models with scale economies, import liberalization can reduce an industry’s exports by cutting domestic production. We find this export destruction mechanism reduced US export growth following the normalization of trade relations with China (PNTR). But there was also an offsetting boost to exports from lower input costs. We use our empirical results to calibrate the strength of scale economies in a quantitative trade model. Counterfactual analysis implies that while PNTR increased aggregate US exports relative to GDP, exports declined in the most exposed industries because of the export destruction effect. On aggregate, the US and China both gain from PNTR, but the gains are larger for China.​
​ We study how firms’ international linkages to Russia and Ukraine have affected investors’ expectations following the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war. We perform an event study around the Russian invasion into Ukraine on February 24, 2022. We find that having trade linkages to Russia in the top decile is associated with a decrease in the cumulative return by 2.16 percentage points and having an affiliate in Russia with a decrease by 3.12 percentage points. Having an affiliate in Ukraine has, however, no effect on firms’ stock market returns. The total impact of trade linkages on the aggregate stock market performance of third countries was on average 0.8 percentage points and of multinational linkages was on average 0.73 percentage points. The losses were largest in European countries.

​Publications