Trade
The Trade programme studies the effects of globalisation and trade policy on workers, firms and economies. It analyses the market power of global firms, the role of international trade agreements, and the impact of Brexit on the UK and EU.
Globalisation dramatically increases flows of goods, services, ideas, investments and people, across national borders.
CEP's research on trade seeks to understand the causes and consequences of these flows and the ways in which policy shapes and responds to them.
Our early research based around the new economic geography looked at the role of local resources and technologies and of the cost of doing business at a distance in explaining the economic geography of nations and regions.
Later research placed more emphasis on the role of firms and how differences across firms helped us better understand why exporters are more productive than non-exporters and how the impact of trade liberalisation would be felt unequally across firms. Why are some firms able to expand and access overseas markets to reach customers and set up globalised production processes while other firms are forced out of business? The way in which firms relocate different stages of the production process and restructure operations internationally by outsourcing and offshoring activities has been the focus of our work on global value chains.
The uneven impacts of trade are felt not only by firms but also by households. Integrating national economies affects wages and prices across the economy, and some workers will be made better off and some worse off as a result. Recently developed tools allow researchers to study inequality in the distribution of these gains from trade in more detail than was previously possible. To understand the economic forces at work CEP research combines these new theoretical models with many different data sources, providing information at country, industry, firm, and even transaction level.
Along with technology and geography, politics and regulations also determine the opportunities and the costs of economic integration, as well as how the gains are shared. Our work on Brexit, and on trade policy more generally, puts these questions to the fore.
Featured Work
Trade publications
Holger Breinlich and Martina Magli
7 November 2024
Gianmarco Ottaviano
23 October 2024
Paola Conconi, Florin Cucu, Federico Gallina and Mattia Nordotto
15 October 2024
Giuseppe Berlingieri, Filippo Boeri, Danial Lashkari and Jonathan Vogel
25 September 2024
Elodie Andrieu and John Morrow
24 September 2024
Michael Blanga-Gubbay, Paola Conconi and Mathieu Parenti
13 September 2024
Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Yanos Zylberberg
12 September 2024
Ghazala Azmat, Florian Englmaier, Alfonso Gambardella, Maria Guadalupe, Raffaella Sadun and Catherine Thomas
9 September 2024
Holger Breinlich, Joao MC Santos Silva and Dennis Novy
6 September 2024
Johannes Boehm and Thomas Chaney
5 September 2024
Nick Jacob and Giordano Mion
1 September 2024
Fabrice Defever, Alejandro Riano and Gonzalo Varela
30 August 2024
Xuepeng Liu, Emanuel Ornelas and Huimin Shi
25 August 2024
Rui Costa, Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin
13 August 2024
Mariapia Mendola, Giovanni Prarolo and Tommaso Sonno
30 July 2024
Hanwei Huang, Kalina Manova, Oscar Perello and Frank Pisch
24 July 2024
Henry G. Overman and Xiaowei Xu
17 July 2024
Italo Colantone, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Tom Schmitz
9 July 2024
Giuseppe Berlingieri and Frank Pisch
23 June 2024
Dennis Novy, Thomas Sampson and Catherine Thomas
21 June 2024
Giorgio Barba Navaretti, Matteo Bugamelli, Emanuele Forlani and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano
19 June 2024
Italo Colantone, Gianmarco Ottaviano and Piero Stanig
17 June 2024
Giordano Mion and Joana Silva
17 June 2024
Latest 25 publications shown. View all