Four essays on international trade networks

This dissertation consists of four essays on international trade networks. The first essay, co-authored with Mauricio Pinzón-Latorre, presents basic facts of the exporter-importer relationships, taking the age of these relationships as a proxy of their value. In the second essay, also co-authored with Mauricio Pinzón-Latorre, we leveraged the fact that firms enter sequentially into international markets and investigate the effect of a free trade liberalization episode on revenue inequalities across exporters. The third essay explores global firms - companies that simultaneously engage in exporting and importing activities. Specifically, I examine the interaction between their export and import dimensions from a geographical perspective. The fourth essay, co-authored with Israel Gutierrez, examines rules of origin and their effect on importers’ sourcing methods. We find that the probability of using a free trade agreement is higher for importers under relational sourcing trading products with more restrictive rules of origin.