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
Carlo Altomonte, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Armando Rungi and Tommaso Sonno
15 October 2021
Josh De Lyon, Swati Dhingra, Sophie Hale and James Smith
14 October 2021
Holger Breinlich, Dennis Novy and J.M.C. Santos Silva
22 September 2021
Italo Colantone, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Piero Stanig
13 September 2021
Emanuel Ornelas and Patricia Tovar
1 September 2021
Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Matthieu Lequien, Marc J. Melitz and Thomas Zuber
9 August 2021
Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen J. Redding
28 July 2021
Facundo Albornoz, Irene Brambilla and Emanuel Ornelas
28 July 2021
Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Thomas Sampson
14 July 2021
Swati Dhingra and Fjolla Kondirolli
2 July 2021
Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain, Dennis Novy and Thomas Sampson
30 June 2021
Marc J. Melitz and Stephen J. Redding
17 June 2021
Holger Breinlich, Valentina Corradi, Nadia Rocha, Michele Ruta, J.M.C. Santos Silva and Tom Zylkin
16 June 2021
Giuseppe Berlingieri, Luca Marcolin and Emanuel Ornelas
3 June 2021