Trade

Blog

LSE Business Review:

US-China tensions could become the biggest trade war in history

The announced US tariffs and the retaliatory actions taken by China have intensified. If the threats are carried out, they will drive the average implied US tariff to exceed 20 per cent, a level not seen since the 1930s....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How the Trump tariffs affect UK firms

How should UK exporters react to the tariffs imposed by President Trump? Some manufacturers may decide to increase production in the US, but those with loyal US consumers who are relatively insensitive to price changes m...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Do Trump's tariffs signal the end of globalisation?

In this second instalment of his interview with Alexis Papazoglou, Thomas Sampson highlights the many uncertainties the future of global trade faces and argues that the biggest policy question for countries around the wo...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

How will US tariffs affect the UK economy?

In this interview with Alexis Papazoglou, Thomas Sampson explains what the US tariffs mean for the UK economy and answers questions on the effects of Brexit on the UK's ability to negotiate the tariffs, as well as on wha...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Deep integration and trade: UK firms in the wake of Brexit

How does dismantling deep integration affect international trade? This column uses firm-level customs data to study the impact of Brexit on UK goods trade. The authors find that in the short term, exit from the Single Ma...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade with nominal rigidities: Understanding the unemployment and welfare effects of the China shock

We present a dynamic quantitative trade and migration model that incorporates downward nominal wage rigidities and show how this framework can generate changes in unemployment and labor participation that match those unc...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Advice to young women economists: learn to say no and protect your time

How are women making their mark in economics? To celebrate Women's History Month, Swati Dhingra shares her experiences, from India to British academia and the Bank of England. It took her a while to learn to say no and p...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Service Offshoring and Export Experience

Service inputs significantly influence export costs and firm internationalisation. A new dataset on French firms’ participation in global value chains reveals that experienced exporters are more likely to source services...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The price of power: Why rising markups hurt innovation and widen inequality

Over the past four decades, the US has seen rising market power, slowing productivity growth, and deepening wealth inequality. This column explores how declining competition may be the common culprit. Weak competition le...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics : Forthcoming

The Value of Managers' Export Experience: Lessons from the Angolan Civil War

We investigate how managers help firms grow by entering a new export market. We conduct an event study on the decision to export to Angola using data on Portuguese firms and workers. We evaluate the impact of the presenc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multinational networks and trade participation

This paper provides a new explanation for the dominance of multinational corporations (MNCs) in international trade: after being acquired by an MNC, firms face lower entry frictions in countries in which their global par...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multinational firms and global innovation

This paper provides an integrated analysis of multinational companies' global production and innovation. We establish novel stylized facts using rich data on the network of production affiliates and patent activity of Ge...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity, matchability and intermediation in production networks

This paper examines intermediation in production networks to unpack the firm attributes and matching costs that govern firm-to-firm networks and the gains from trade. Exploiting rich customs data for Chile, we show that ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Applied Econometrics: Forthcoming

Unlocking New Methods to Estimate Country-specific Trade Costs and Trade Elasticities

We propose new methods to identify the full impact of country-specific characteristics on bilateral trade flows within the framework of ‘the new quantitative trade model.’ We complement theory with a simple two-stage est...Read more...

External publication

International Trade: Issue 2

Over the last four decades, many developing countries initiated reforms that have lowered barriers to trade. Yet despite these reforms, developing countries still remain far less open than developed ones, both because of...Read more...

Journal article

Canadian Journal of Economics: Forthcoming

Evaluating the Impact of Export Finance Support on Firm-level Export Performance: Evidence from Pakistan

This paper evaluates the impact of two large export finance support schemes on firm-level export performance. The Export Finance Scheme (EFS) and the Long-Term Finance Facility for Plant & Machinery (LTFF), provide loans...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor market effects of global supply chain disruptions

We examine the labor market consequences of global supply chain disruptions. Specifically, we consider a temporary increase in international trade costs similar to the one observed during the COVID-19 pandemic and analyz...Read more...

CentrePiece article

How Brexit affected the trade of UK firms

The UK left the EU’s single market and customs union at the start of 2021, entering into the Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU. Rebecca Freeman, Marco Garofalo, Enrico Longoni, Kalina Manova, Rebecca Mari, Thom...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Large-scale land acquisitions: Trees, trade and structural change

Large-scale land acquisitions are a key component of agricultural foreign direct investment. In 2023 alone, nearly 6% of the world's arable land was acquired globally. This paper examines their impact on agricultural pro...Read more...

External publication

Foreign Direct Investment

Multinational enterprises are at the centre of policy debates in low- and middle-income countries. As some of the most productive and innovative firms in the world, which are at the core of global supply chains, multinat...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Lobbying for Globalisation

Using detailed information from lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, we construct a unique dataset that allows us to identify which firms lobby on Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) negotiated by the Unite...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Labor Unions and the Electoral Consequences of Trade Liberalization

We show that the Brazilian trade liberalization in the early 1990s led to a permanent relative decline in the vote share of left-wing presidential candidates in the regions more affected by the tariff cuts. This happened...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Paper tiger? Chinese science and home bias in citations

We investigate the phenomenon of home bias in scientific citations, where researchers disproportionately cite work from their own country. We develop a benchmark for expected citations based on the relative size of count...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

New approaches to measure (increasing) concentration in Europe

Concentration (the share of a market's output produced by its largest firms) is a key proxy for measuring market competition. This column introduces a cross-country dataset to measure concentration at the industry level ...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Cultural Homophily and Collaboration in Superstar Teams

One may reasonably think that cultural homophily, defined as the tendency to associate with others of similar culture, affects collaboration in multinational teams in general but not in superstar teams of professionals a...Read more...