This study examines whether exporting enhances efficiency and favors specific inputs. We develop a production function model within a dynamic exporting and investment framework, capturing factor-biased technical changes. Using Kalman filtering to address measurement error and propensity score matching to control for self-selection into exporting, we analyze Colombia’s manufacturing sectors from 1981 to 1991. New exporters achieve a 4% annual increase in labor-augmenting and unskilled labor relative productivity, with no change in Hicks-neutral productivity. Unskilled labor-augmenting productivity grows by 8% annually, aligning with machinery asset expansion, while TFP rises by 3% per year.

We show that trade liberalization in oligopsonistic environments can generate heterogeneous markdown responses across different skill groups, thereby exacerbating within-firm wage dispersion. We empirically study this monopsony-driven inequality channel using a quasi-experiment provided by Taiwan's Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China, which liberalized trade for a selective set of product categories. Focusing on Taiwanese machinery manufacturers, we find that the ECFA increased overall wages by 7%. However, it raised wage markdowns by 6.9% over low-skilled workers, while markdowns over high-skilled workers were unaffected. The resulting heterogeneous markdown responses aligns with an increase of 7.5%--10.4% in within-firm wage dispersion.

I study how sunk entry costs affect the long-run market outcomes when entrants irreversibly choose their scale. In this environment, entry costs can influence both the long-run number of competitors and the industry's scale distribution. Developing and estimating a dynamic game of entry and scale choices, I evaluate this channel in the context of a land-use deregulatory reform in the South Korean cinema chain industry. The deregulation is estimated to act as an entry subsidy, appealing to larger-scale theaters. Despite this subsidization effect, the industry's total firm value is 5.6 percent less than it would have been without the reform due to intensified competition and increased expenses on fixed operating costs from the expansion of larger-scale theater. This implicit cost of the deregulation is not uncovered by the model with entry choices alone, as it obscures the shift in the distribution toward a larger scale.

This paper estimates a dynamic model of the firm's joint export and import decision process. In the model, participating in trade improves within-period profits and future productivity. In addition, doing one trade activity facilitates the other by reducing the associated fixed/sunk costs. Employing a Bayesian MCMC estimator, I fit the model to Colombian chemical plant panel data from 1981 to 1985. Two findings stand out: (i) importing increases future productivity significantly while exporting does not. (ii) importing facilitates exporting by lowering the sunk costs of entering the export market, while exporting facilitates importing by decreasing the fixed costs of continuing import. A counterfactual simulation shows that subsidizing the fixed costs of importing is the most effective among trade cost subsidy schemes in improving the average productivity and firm value.

We assess the replicability of Orr (2022)'s method for estimating within-plant productivity across product lines, which combines demand estimation with cost minimization. The original study uses input price shocks in other output markets as instrumental variables, with exclusion restrictions based on downstream purchase shares. Reconstructing the original dataset of Indian machinery producers from 2000-2007, we reproduce the main productivity patterns and demonstrate their robustness to variations in the exclusion threshold. The main results remain robust in extended samples (2010-2019, 2000-2019) when calibrating demand parameters to Orr (2022)'s 2000-2007 estimates, as estimation on these extended periods yields inadmissible demand systems.

We study the effects of a merger on banks' decisions to close brick-to-mortar branches in response to the rise of online banking. Online banking tends to lead to reduced demand for branch services, but the responding branch reduction can be inefficiently slow when banks strategically delay closures to outlast competing branches. A merger can expedite branch closures for the merging banks by internalizing such business-stealing motives. However, non-merging banks might free-ride on this effort, slowing the overall branch reduction. Leveraging a 2015 merger between two mega banks in South Korea, we aim to capture this trade-off in the South Korean banking industry from 2010 to 2019. Our difference-in-differences framework reveals a 25 percent reduction in branches for the merging bank in local markets directly affected by the merger. In contrast, non-merging banks only reduce branches by 4 percent in the same markets, underscoring the significant impact of free-riding motives. Inspired by this evidence, we plan to develop and estimate a dynamic game of strategic branch opening-closure to quantify the welfare implications of the merger and assess the relative importance of two countervailing strategic motives.