Showing results 1 - 10 of 12
| Pol Antras
November 16, 2020, Paper: "This paper evaluates the extent to which the world economy has entered a phase of de‐globalisation, and it offers some speculative thoughts on the future of global value chains in the post‐COVID‐19 age. Although the growth of international trade flows relative to that of GDP has slowed down since the Great Recession, this paper finds little systematic evidence indicating that the world economy has already entered an…
| Pol Antras
September 30, 2020, Paper: "Pandemics are only possible because of international travel. But–perhaps surprisingly–in the absence of social distancing a more globalised country will not necessarily suffer a worse outbreak. Pol Antràs (Harvard), Stephen J. Redding …"
Non-HKS Author Website - Pol Antras
| Pol Antras
July 7, 2020, Paper, "This paper develops a model of human interaction that provides microfoundations for a gravity equation for international trade and a multi-country Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model of disease dynamics. We study how decreases in technological and man-made barriers to trade and labor mobility affect the rate at which human beings interact at short and long distances, and the consequences of these interactions for…
| Pol Antras
On the Measurement of Upstreamness and Downstreamness in Global Value Chains. Pol Antras, October 30, 2017, Paper, "This paper offers four contributions to the empirical literature on global value chains (GVCs). First, we provide a succinct overview of several measures developed to capture the upstreamness or downstreamness of industries and countries in GVCs. Second, we employ data from the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) to document the…
| Pol Antras
Venting Out: Exports during a Domestic Slump. Pol Antras, October 23, 2017, Paper, "Using Spanish firm level data for the period 2000-2013, we explore the differences in the export behavior of firms during the years of sustained economic growth, 2000-2008, and during the Great Recession years, 2009-2013. Exploiting geographical variation in the reduction in domestic demand caused by the financial crisis, we document empirically the existence of…
| Pol Antras
Internalizing Global Value Chains: A Firm-Level Analysis. Laura Alfaro, Pol Antras, July 2017, Paper, "In this Appendix, we provide more details on firm behavior conditional on the path of ownership structure along the value chain. Notice first that solving program (5), we obtain the following optimal choice of investment by the supplier at stage..."…
| Pol Antras
On the Geography of Global Value Chains. Pol Antras, 2016, Paper, "This paper studies the optimal location of production for the different stages in a sequential global value chain. We develop a general-equilibrium model featuring a proximity-concentration tradeoff: slicing global value chains across countries allows to better exploit agglomeration economies, but such fragmentation comes at the cost of increased transportation costs. We show…
| Pol Antras
Globalization, Inequality and Welfare. Pol Antras, September 19, 2016, Paper, "This paper studies the welfare implications of trade opening in a world in which trade raises aggregate income but also increases income inequality, and in which redistribution needs to occur via a distortionary income tax-transfer system. We provide tools to characterize and quantify the effects of trade opening on the distribution of disposable income (after…
| Pol Antras
Poultry in Motion: A Study of International Trade Finance Practices. Pol Antras, C. Fritz Foley, August 2015, Paper, "This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the financing terms that support international trade. The choice of trade finance terms balances the risk that an importer defaults on an exporter and the possibility that an exporter does not deliver goods as specified. Analysis of transaction-level data from a US exporter…
| Pol Antras
Internalizing Global Value Chains: A Firm-Level Analysis. Laura Alfaro, Pol Antras, April 2015, Paper. "In recent decades, technological progress and falling trade barriers have allowed firms to slice up their value chains, retaining within their boundaries and in their domestic economies only a subset of their production stages. A key question facing firms worldwide is figuring out which segments of the value chain are more profitably off-…