Lionel Fontagné

We propose and construct novel measures of the effectiveness and potential of trade blocs, combining estimation with granular data and simulation with a New Quantitative Trade Model. We deploy our methods and new indexes to quantify the potential benefits from (i) further integration within the largest and most successful trade liberalization effort in the world -the Single European Market -and (ii) a possible enlargement. Three main results and implications stand out from our analysis. First, European integration has been very effective in promoting trade among its members, with heterogeneous effects across industries and member states. Second, and most novel and important, our estimates reveal that only half of the potential benefits from EU membership have been realized to date. Third, EU accession will generate very large gains from trade for the new joiners and moderate gains for existing members, with larger benefits for some small and peripheral EU members. Importantly, our methods enable us to construct confidence bounds for the effects of EU enlargement.

This paper investigates the role played by firms’ managerial skills in the heterogeneous reaction of exporters to common exogenous changes in their international competitiveness (here captured by changes in the real exchange rate). Relying on a simple theoretical framework, we show that firms with better managerial skills have higher profits, market power, and are able to adapt their markup more when faced with a competitiveness shock. We test this prediction relying on detailed firm-product-destination level export data from France for the period 1995-2007 matched with specific information on the firms’ share of managers. Our findings show that managerial intensive firms have larger exporter price elasticity to real exchange rate variations. The effect is not trivial: in the wake of a depreciation, exporters whose management intensity is one standard deviation higher than the average, increase their prices by 51% to 73% more than the average exporter. This finding is robust to controlling for the alternative explanations suggested by the previous literature to explain the heterogeneous pass-through of firms.

This paper introduces a causal machine learning approach to investigate the impact of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA). We propose a matrix completion algorithm on French customs data to obtain multidimensional counterfactuals at the firm, product and destination levels. We find a small but significant positive impact on average at the product-level intensive margin. On the other hand, the extensive margin shows product churning due to the treaty beyond regular entry-exit dynamics: one product in eight that was not previously exported substitutes almost as many that are no longer exported. When we delve into the heterogeneity, we find that the effects of the treaty are higher for products at a comparative advantage. Focusing on multiproduct firms, we find that they adjust their portfolio in Canada by reallocating towards their first and most exported product due to increasing local market competition after trade liberalization. Finally, multidimensional counterfactuals allow us to evaluate the general equilibrium effect of the CETA. Specifically, we observe trade diversion, as exports to other destinations are re-directed to Canada.

Using monthly firm-level exports and imports over 1993–2020, we uncover four facts: (i) deviations of large exporters from the average growth rate explain a large share of aggregate fluctuations; (ii) an important source for these deviations is the top exporters’ higher loadings on common shocks; (iii) the stronger reaction of the top 1% exporters to the GFC and Covid crises contributed to the export collapses; (iv) a higher elasticity to large demand shocks, not a different exposure to global value chain shocks, contributes to this stronger reaction. The results show that idiosyncratic reactions of large firms to common shocks matter for aggregate export fluctuations, and are especially relevant for the trade collapses of the 2008/2009 crisis and the Pandemic.