Publications

"Do Economic Integration Agreements Increase Members' Migration? Accounting for Migration in Trade Agreements" with Scott Baier, Review of International Economics (2025)

A substantial body of literature establishes that economic integration agreements (EIAs) facilitate trade among member countries. However, their impact on migration flows remains less understood. In this paper, we construct a stylized spatial general equilibrium model to study the impact of economic integration agreements on trade and migration. The model is similar to that of Allen and Arkolakis (2014) and Redding and Rossi-Hansberg (2017), and yields structural gravity equations for both trade and migration that allow us to estimate the direct impact of trade agreements on trade and migration flows. Given these parameter estimates, we can simulate the spatial model to highlight the general equilibrium effects of trade agreements on trade and migration. In our simulation exercise, we show that if the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) were modified to have the trade-creating effect of a common market, it would foster more trade within the group and encourage in-migration from outside the trading bloc. If the USMCA were also modified to allow migration costs to fall to the level of a common market, the within-migration impact on trade and welfare would be more modest. Published Paper

Working Papers

"Tariffs and Trade Diversion with Multiple Export Markets" with David Riker

We develop a partial equilibrium model that can estimate the impact of a change in access to an export market on the pattern of international trade and the prices paid to exporting agricultural producers in a country. The model includes barriers to shifting exports to other countries, limited flexibility in production levels, and stock management that can smooth price fluctuations over time. USITC Working Paper 2025-01-B

"Structural gravity and nonparametric trade costs" with Kevin Duncan

This paper introduces a flexible approach to estimating nonlinear trade cost effects within the structural gravity framework using generalized additive models (GAMs). Unlike standard log-linear gravity models with constant elasticities, our method allows continuous policy and geographic trade cost variables to enter the trade cost vector nonparametrically while preserving theoretical consistency. Using bilateraltrade data, we document significant nonlinearities: trade is relatively inelastic at low and high levels of trade costs and more elastic in central ranges of trade cost distributions. We show how these patterns are masked under conventional specifications, and discuss how estimates of state-dependent elasticities can inform general equilibrium counterfactuals for richer policy analysis.

"The heterogeneous effects of rules of origin" with Ross Jestrab (in progress)

"Temporary Trade Barriers and Trade Growth" with Cheng Chen (resting paper)

Temporary trade barriers (TTBs) like antidumping (AD) have been shown to have large and persistent effects on trade flows between countries, but there is mixed evidence on the direction of the effect on trade to unrelated markets in part driven by unique institutional features that complicate identification. In this paper, we revisit classical TTB questions with a focus on AD policy through the lens of export growth using publicly available product-level trade data. We find qualitatively different trade effects when accounting for growth effects that suggest AD investigations are associated with global reductions in within-product trade, across all destinations. We provide evidence that these reductions are not primarily driven by policy-related chilling effects, and argue a supply-side investment/innovation channel is a larger contributor. Our findings suggest the aggregate impact of AD policy on the global trade flows of exporters is potentially large due to complementarity across export markets and long run effects.