Research

Ongoing Projects

• Building a New Reputation: The Impact of Adopting Voluntary Standards [Slides] [Draft]
  • Finalist for the 2024 UNCTAD AIB Award

  _{Abstract: Raising environmental awareness has led to the proliferation of environmental standards. They aim at helping the organisation to reduce its environmental impact and increase its operating efficiency. Using detailed French administrative data, I estimate the effect of voluntary environmental certification on firms’ export performance. I observe that the environmental certification positively impacts the probability to export (extensive margin) and the volume of exports (intensive margin), through an increase of the export price. The probability of export of certified firms increases by 1.4% while the volume of export increases by 10.8% following the certification thanks to a 2.2% increase of the price and an increase of 9.6% of the exported quantity. However, this effect is heterogeneous across destinations, products and across firms: the quantity exported to destinations with higher environmental awareness increases.}

• Protection or Protectionism: The Effect of Technical Regulations on Inputs’ Sourcing, with Irene Iodice [Draft available upon request] [Slides]
  • Winner of the FIW Young Economist Award’23
  • Finalist for 2024 Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award

  _{Abstract: This study explores how Technical Barriers to Trade (TBTs) regulations affect firms’ sourcing of intermediate inputs and supply chains. We build on the Grossman et al.,(2021a) model to analyse how new standards influence firms’ import locations, quantities, and prices. We created a comprehensive database of all TBTs implemented from 1995-2020, integrated with trade agreement depths, a panel of French importers, and a new index measuring regulatory distances between the EU’s TBT and input origin countries. Our findings reveal that EU TBT implementations lead to a 4% increase in inputs imported from EU suppliers and a 2% price rise, while imports from non-EU countries drop by 4.5%. This shift mainly affects less developed and EU-disconnected countries, highlighting that supply chain reorganization depends on regulatory adaptation costs. Additionally, supply chains with high relationship-specific investments are less impacted by national standard changes.}

• The impact of labour standards on growth, with Céline Carrère and Marcelo Olarreaga

• How to make trade agreements work better for society, with Richard Baldwin and Giovanni Donato

Publication

• “Estimating the general equilibrium effects of services trade liberalization”, Review of International Economics, 2022

  _{Abstract: The intangible nature of services and the lack of disaggregated trade data increase the difficulties involved in assessing the impediments to cross-border trade in services. In an attempt to reduce the information gap existing in services trade, this article estimates the impact of trade barriers along with the conditional and general equilibrium responses to the partial liberalization of services trade, using structural gravity. Using data collected by the OECD, I find that the level of restrictiveness applied by an importing country has a negative and significant impact on trade; however, this impact is heterogeneous across services sectors. By focusing on eight services sectors, I find that the partial liberalization of services trade will cause real income to increase by, on average, 4.8%. The most restrictive countries are the largest winners of the partial liberalization of services trade, benefiting from the availability of less expensive sources and an increase in their attractiveness as a source.}

• Identifying Spillovers of Trade Agreements Through Impact Assessments: A New Database, with Richard Baldwin and Giovanni Donato - Forthcoming at the World Trade Review

  _{Abstract: In the past decades, a backlash against globalisation has been brewing, especially in advanced economies. Despite this backlash being only partly determined by trade, we observe an increasing demand for transparency on procedures, methodologies, and results. Impact assessments (IAs) aim at identifying expected effects of trade agreements and highlighting policymakers’ concerns, representing an important tool to foster public acceptance. To help us identify spillovers of trade liberalisation, we construct a country and sector specific database of impact assessments. This database provides an overview of the evolution of the coverage and methodological approaches taken by the EU and US for their IAs. We rely on official EU and US sources over the period 1990-2023. We first observe differences in terms of methodology and institutional framework within and between the two countries. Secondly, the coverage of non-trade outcomes has evolved over time both for the EU and the US, with the inclusion of more labour, environmental, and human rights indicators as well as cross-cutting issues. We observe that the depth of the evaluation is correlated with the partner country’s social protection and environmental performance. Lastly, we find that the inclusion of a sector in the analysis is driven by economic reasons in the EU but political reasons in the US.}