NBER Publications by Natalia Ramondo

One feature of globalization is that countries are increasingly specialized in either innovation or in production. To understand the forces behind this specialization and its welfare consequences, we develop a monopolistic competition model of trade and multinational production (MP) in which firms face a tradeoff between producing close to customers and producing in the least-cost location. At the country level, the location of innovation and production is determined by comparative advantage and home market effects that arise from the interaction of trade and MP costs with increasing returns to scale. The model yields simple structural expressions for bilateral trade and MP that we use to calibrate the model across a set of OECD countries. Our counterfactual exercises shed light on the eff...

Models in which growth is driven by innovation naturally lead to scale effects. These scale effects result in the counterfactual prediction that larger countries should be much richer than smaller ones. We explore and quantify two candidates to solve the puzzle: First, countries are not fully isolated from each other; and second, countries are not fully integrated domestically. To such end, we build a quantitative model of trade and multinational production (MP) with frictions to move goods and ideas not only across, but also within countries. The calibrated model goes a long way to resolve the puzzle. The existence of domestic frictions, rather than openness to trade and MP, is what allows the extended model to come close to matching the data.

This paper quantifies the gains from openness arising from trade and multinational production (MP). We present a model that captures key dimensions of the interaction between these two flows: Trade and MP are competing ways to serve a foreign market; MP relies on imports of intermediate goods from the home country; and foreign affiliates of multinationals can export part of their output. The calibrated model implies that the gains from trade can be twice as high as the gains calculated in trade-only models, while the gains from MP are slightly lower than the gains computed in MP-only models.