Simon J. Bolz , Fabrice Naumann , Philipp M. Richter
{"title":"Unilateral environmental policy and offshoring","authors":"Simon J. Bolz , Fabrice Naumann , Philipp M. Richter","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104185","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104185","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines how offshoring shapes emissions leakage and global emissions in response to unilateral environmental policy. We use a general equilibrium offshoring model with heterogeneous firms, based on standard modeling assumptions, where firms allocate labor between production tasks and emissions abatement. We find that global emissions respond non-monotonically to a unilateral emissions tax increase: for small cross-country tax differentials, emissions fall; but as the difference widens, leakage exceeds 100%, raising global emissions due to a global technique effect. The cleanest domestic firms start offshoring and incumbent offshoring firms become dirtier under declining effective foreign taxes. We isolate the offshoring margin – one underexplored channel of leakage – and contrast our findings with comparable models of trade in final goods: the mode of globalization matters. Complementing the unilateral reform with a border carbon adjustment (BCA) prevents emissions leakage but may raise inequality between countries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104185"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145570140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Commercial rivalry as seller incidence shifting: Non-parametric accounting of the China shock","authors":"James E. Anderson","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104208","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104208","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Intense US–China commercial rivalry is quantified in this paper with novel non-parametric relative resistance sufficient statistics. China’s manufacturing seller incidence falls (seller price rises) 8.2% yearly as China’s sales share quadruples over 2000-14. US seller incidence rises 6.3% yearly as US sales share halves. A 10% rise in US (China) 2014 sales share reduces seller incidence 10.05% (9.74%) and raises average seller incidence of others. Trade elasticities very close to one fit trade shares to revealed relative resistances. Trade elasticities identified off variation in observable buyer prices or trade costs are biased upward by omitted variation in unobservable buyer frictions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104208"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145880567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Export agriculture and rural poverty: Evidence from Indonesian palm oil","authors":"Ryan B. Edwards","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104209","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104209","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper measures the impacts of Indonesia’s palm oil export expansion on district poverty and household expenditure from 2002 to 2015. Identification exploits geographic variation in agro-climatic suitability in a long difference instrumental variable framework. The main result is that a 10 percentage point increase in district area under cultivation for oil palm corresponds to around six percentage points faster poverty reduction and nine percent faster expenditure growth. The expenditure gains are principally explained by rising returns to agricultural labor. I find no evidence of labor reallocation across sectors: new farmland absorbed labor saved from palm adoption. The expansion increased local government revenues, spending and public goods, while increasing deforestation, forest fires, certain health problems and conflict. Indonesian palm oil thus provides a striking modern illustration of some of the trade-offs inherent in large changes in trade and land use.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104209"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145924515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kathryn Baragwanath , Gordon Hanson , Amit K. Khandelwal , Chen Liu , Hogeun Park
{"title":"Using satellite imagery to measure the impacts of new highways: An application to India","authors":"Kathryn Baragwanath , Gordon Hanson , Amit K. Khandelwal , Chen Liu , Hogeun Park","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104201","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104201","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper integrates daytime and nighttime satellite imagery into a spatial general-equilibrium model to evaluate the returns to investments in new motorways. Our approach has particular value in developing-country settings in which spatially granular economic data are scarce. To demonstrate our method, we use publicly available imagery to evaluate India’s road construction projects in the early 2000s. Estimating the model and evaluating welfare impacts only requires remotely-sensed data. We find that India’s road investments improved aggregate welfare, particularly for the largest and smallest urban markets. Welfare gains were unevenly distributed across space, with the Golden Quadrilateral disproportionately benefiting large, already connected markets, while national highway upgrades delivered greater gains to smaller, more remote locations. More generally, within-district variation explains a large share of the overall spatial variance in welfare changes during this period, underscoring the value of high-resolution satellite imagery for capturing localized economic effects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104201"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145836617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A swing-state theorem, with evidence","authors":"Xiangjun Ma , John McLaren , Karim Chalak","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104189","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104189","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the effects of local partisanship in a model of electoral competition. Voters care about policy, but they also care about the identity of the party in power, with most states biassed toward one party or the other (i.e., ‘red’ or ‘blue’). We show that electoral competition leads to maximization of welfare with an extra weight on citizens of the ‘swing state:’ the one that is not biassed toward either party. We show empirically that the US tariff structure is biassed toward swing-state industries, such that a voter living in a non-swing state is treated as being worth 82% as much as a voter in a swing state. This represents a policy bias orders of magnitude greater than the bias found in studies of protection for sale.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104189"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145570178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The causal effects of commodity shocks","authors":"Alisson Curatola-Melo , Bernardo Guimaraes","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104200","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104200","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper disentangles the causal effects of commodity price movements on emerging market indicators from those driven by correlated external factors, such as global growth expectations and financial conditions. We employ an identification-through-heteroskedasticity approach using USDA Grain Stock reports, which have an exogenous impact on soybean, corn, and wheat prices. Our findings show that the causal effects of grain price shocks on default risk, stock indexes, and exchange rates are typically less than half the size of the unadjusted estimates.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104200"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145681862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexandra Avdeenko , Maximilian Kaiser , Krisztina Kis-Katos , Leonie Reher
{"title":"Sanctions, sales, and stigma: Intermediary online firms’ market role in sustaining trade","authors":"Alexandra Avdeenko , Maximilian Kaiser , Krisztina Kis-Katos , Leonie Reher","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104197","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104197","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, online intermediaries enabled brands to retain a presence in the Russian market as many global companies—presumably or actually—withdrew due to legal and reputational concerns. This paper examines how sales by intermediaries responded to international sanctions. Using novel data on customer transactions of 95 global brands from 1761 web shops, we show that sales to Russia dropped significantly after the invasion, especially among shops from countries enacting export restrictions. This drop was substantial yet not absolute. Guided by a stylized conceptual framework, we explore which intermediary shops helped sustain sales to Russia, linking their actions to economic incentives and the brand-specific legal and reputational concerns. Overall, we demonstrate how market structure shapes shops’ compliance with sanctions and highlight how economic incentives undermine compliance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104197"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145615835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dominant drivers of current account dynamics","authors":"Lukas Boer , Jaewoo Lee , Mingzuo Sun","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104199","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104199","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>What are the key drivers of current account dynamics? We estimate shocks that explain most of the variation in the current account for the US and other G7 economies. Discovering that the dominant shocks contradict the expenditure switching effect at business cycle frequency, we then explore which macroeconomic shocks are behind these empirical dominant drivers of the current account. Rather than traditional aggregate shocks to supply and demand or recently emphasized financial shocks, shocks to the relative demand between home and foreign goods are found to play a pivotal role in current account dynamics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104199"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145681144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What drives exporters’ market dynamics? A new framework for disentangling micro shocks","authors":"Lu Han","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104186","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104186","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Exporters frequently change their set of destination markets. This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the underlying drivers of changes in exporters’ market decisions over time. The approach exploits information on price and quantity changes in firms’ continuing markets to disentangle the micro shocks that drive firms’ market changes. Applying the method to customs data from China (2000–2006) and the UK (2010–2016), I find consistent results showing that most firm- and firm-product-level market changes are driven by demand-related shocks, with a nontrivial proportion of these changes being correlated across markets.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104186"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145519389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Single and attractive: Uniqueness and stability of economic equilibria under monotonicity assumptions","authors":"Patrizio Bifulco , Jochen Glück , Oliver Krebs , Bohdan Kukharskyy","doi":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104187","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104187","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper characterizes equilibrium properties of a broad class of economic models that allow multiple heterogeneous agents to interact in heterogeneous ways across several markets. Our key contribution is a new theorem that provides sufficient conditions for uniqueness, attractivity, and stability of solutions of non-linear equation systems. To illustrate the applicability of our theorem, we characterize the general equilibrium properties of an extended version of the “universal gravity” framework, which comprises a host of seminal trade models. Specifically, we provide conditions for uniqueness, stability, and attractivity when, in line with real-world observations, (i) supply elasticities are allowed to vary by country, or (ii) multiple sectors are introduced. We also provide a practical toolkit for future research on how our theorem can be applied to establish uniqueness, stability, and attractivity of equilibria in a broad set of economic models.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16276,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 104187"},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145486067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}