This paper exploits bilateral trade flows of final and intermediate goods together with the structure of static trade models that deliver gravity equations to identify exogenous changes in trade costs between countries. The authors then use a local projections approach to assess the effects of trade cost shocks on consumer price (CPI) inflation.

Global value chains (GVC) are a pervasive feature of modern production, but they are hard to measure. Using U.S. Census microdata, this paper develops novel measures of the linkages between U.S. manufacturing establishments’ imports and exports. The paper documents three new GVC patterns.

This paper studies the evolution of manufacturing value added shares in 11 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries through the lens of an open economy model of structural change.

This paper looks at the effect of fluctuations in the global financial cycle on real exchange rates.

This paper uses a novel dataset on the prices of the travel guidebooks published by the German publishing house Baedeker between 1832 and 1944 to construct a hedonic price index for guidebooks. Comparing these indexes to the list prices of these guidebooks, the paper shows that the failure to adjust for improvements in the quality of the guidebooks over time imparts a substantial upward bias to measured inflation.

This study offers new insights into exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) using U.S. import price indexes by country-of-origin, covering two decades of monthly data.