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Trade

  • Working Paper

    Shortages of Critical Goods in a Global Economy

    This paper studies shortages of critical goods in an open economy with credit market frictions and the role of trade and industrial policy in mitigating them.

  • Working Paper

    Endogenous Rigidities and Capital Misallocation: Evidence from Containerships

    The paper investigates how endogenous rigidities inhibit physical capital reallocation. The authors focus on the role of contract duration—a classic example of an adjustment rigidity.

  • Dallas Fed Economics

    What Big Macs tell us about the disconnect between prices and exchange rates

    The Economist’s Big Mac Index is a measure of the real exchange rate that instead of measuring the price of a basket of goods and services, measures the price of one good, the McDonald’s Big Mac. Recent empirical work finds that financial factors, and not monetary ones, underlay a very high correlation between nominal exchange rates and the Big Mac-based real exchange rate.

  • Dallas Fed Economics

    Tariffs increased in 2025; why did U.S. imports grow?

    The U.S. average tariff rate increased from 2.9 percent in January 2025 to 14.8 percent in December, a rise of almost 12 percentage points. The surge—the largest such U.S. jump since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs at the onset of the Great Depression in 1930—led to a sharp increase in the tariff-inclusive prices that U.S. importers paid.

  • Working Paper

    Human Capital Accumulation Across Space

    This paper studies how human capital shapes the economic geography of development. The authors propose a model in which human capital acquisition costs vary across space, and regions with higher human capital invest more in human-capital-augmenting technology.

  • Working Paper

    Globalization, Inflation Dynamics and the Slope of the Phillips Curve

    This paper studies how international trade has affected U.S. inflation dynamics. The authors develop a multi-region New Keynesian model of an open monetary union in which regional Phillips curve slopes depend on exposure to imported goods.

  • Working Paper

    Endogenous Markups and Trade Elasticities

    This paper develops a search model of international trade where buyers allocate costly cognitive attention across suppliers.

  • Special Report

    USMCA trade outlook matters for the U.S., not just for Canada and Mexico

    While the overall impact on the U.S. of a redrawn regional trade agreement with Mexico and Canada appears modest in most plausible scenarios, policies promoting regionalization differ sharply in their impacts.

  • Dallas Fed Economics

    Mitigating tariffs via USMCA may have limited 2025 price increases

    Higher tariffs do not automatically show up one-for-one in consumer prices. Price effects depend on how firms respond. Foreign exporters may cut pre-tariff prices to preserve access to the U.S. market, while domestic importers or retailers may absorb part of the increase with lower margins.

  • Dallas Fed Economics

    How USMCA compliance cushioned the 2025 tariff shock

    Despite regional sourcing and compliance costs, USMCA-based firms enjoy an edge over competitors outside North America facing higher U.S. tariffs.