Research

Working papers

Trade Relationships During and After a Crisis:  Evidence from Road Disruptions in Colombian Flower Exports (Job market paper)

I study the impact of an extreme weather event on international trade relationships. Exploiting variation in Colombian flower exporters’ access to cargo terminals during an unprecedented La Niña season in 2010-11 when some roads became impassable, I find that exporter-importer relationships exposed to road disruptions became 7 to 9 percentage points less likely to end in the short run. But in the medium to long run, importers who had multiple relationships exposed to the shock were more likely to end them. I present a theoretical framework that rationalizes these empirical results based on (1) the relative cost of establishing a new trade relationship, and (2) the proportion of relationships in firms’ portfolios that are exposed to the shock. The findings shed light on the dynamics of international buyer-seller  relationships in the context of extreme weather events. Link.

Work in progress

Transitivity in Trade (with Carlo Perroni and Dennis Novy).

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A large literature on social networks shows that individuals are more likely connected with each other if they share connections with other individuals. We take this idea to trade between firms. Firms are more likely to trade with each other if they share common trading partners, and forming a new connection makes trade with other partners more likely. We provide a statistically based characterisation of transitivity in trade transactions that is applicable to any model of trade where the formation of agent-to-agent links involves a stochastic component (e.g., arising from random search or random matching), and discuss how transitivity can be measured in transactions data. We apply this methodology to firm-level Colombia-US exporter-importer data. Our results suggest that there is a transitivity effect in trade relationships for Colombian exporters located at shorter distances between partners. We quantify the magnitude of the transitivity effect by using the panel nature of the trade data, relying on an instrumental variable approach. 

Public Policy Publications

• (2020) "Propagations of Shocks in Global Value Chains: The Coronavirus Case" with Elie Gerschel and Isabelle Mejean. IPP Policy Brief. No. 53. Link.

• (2019) "The cost of Brexit uncertainty: Missing partners from French exporters" with Julien Martin and Isabelle Mejean. IPP Policy Brief. No.48. Link.

Other publications

•  "How Global Value Chains Became Victims of Covid-19." Newspaper article published in The European Financial Review. Printed version April-May, 2020.  with Elie Gershel and Isabelle Mejean. Link.