Published papers

This study investigates quality trade using a declaration level customs dataset from 2014 to 2020. We find that high quality products tend to be traded with higher per-unit freight costs, lower ad valorem tariff rates, and with countries with higher GDP per capita, even after controlling firm-specific and product-specific time-invariant factors.

Sovereign debt restructurings are associated with declines in the growth of GDP, investment, bank credit to the private sector and capital flows. Our empirical findings show that the intensity of these losses depends on two aspects: whether the restructuring preempts a default and the extent of the reliance of the country's private sector on domestic bank credit. Post-default restructurings are associated with worse outcomes than restructurings that take place preemptively without missing payments and going into default. Much of that difference is driven by restructurings in countries with relatively large banking sectors, in particular during post-default episodes.

This study is the first to comprehensively investigate international trade at the firm-level using Japan's customs data for the 2014–2020 period. We first decompose international trade into the intensive and extensive margins and show that the intensive margin accounts for around 30% and 40% of the variation in partner country-specific exports and imports, respectively. We next find a substantial concentration of trading firms: in 2017, the top 10% of exporters accounted for 96.6% of all exports, while the top 10% of importers were responsible for 94.6% of all imports. Finally, we match the customs data with other firm-level datasets and estimate the performance premia of exporting firms. Our findings indicate that exporting manufacturing firms outperform non-exporting manufacturing firms in all aspects we consider: sales, value added, the number of employees, the capital-labor ratio, productivity, and wages. Interestingly, the exporter premia of manufacturing firms for value added, labor productivity, and total factor productivity decreased between 2014 and 2016 and then increased until 2019, whereas the exporter premium for the average wage steadily increased.