International trade affects consumption prices, with potentially different impacts on poor and rich consumers. We study these unequal impacts building on the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) gravity model of Fajgelbaum and Khandelwal (2016). We augment the original model with a home bias in tastes and allow for trade costs to differ for domestic and foreign trade. In this setup, we show that the structural parameters governing the welfare gains are highly sensitive to the determinants of spending on domestic goods. This extension largely weakens the pro-poor bias of trade which leads us to conclude that the AIDS gravity framework does not generate robust results about the distributive effects of trade within countries.

This paper develops a novel method to estimate inequality within a country based on what it imports. If preferences are non-homothetic, rich and poor individuals in a country have different consumption profiles. Observing imports can thus inform us about the income distribution in a country. The global availability of trade data allows us to estimate inequality using the same transparent and comparable method for a large sample of countries over time. Compared to conventional data, we feature an especially good coverage of developing countries. We provide a number of robustness checks and cross-validation exercises to gauge the performance of our method.

This paper studies ``neighborhood market effects'' in international trade. For differentiated goods, a mismatch between local demand conditions and supplied varieties hinders trade. I show that domestic and nearby foreign consumer preferences drive firms' selection into product specifications under non-uniform trade costs and economies of scale in differentiated goods' production. I isolate the demand channel relying on variation in bilateral trade costs with countries across the global income distribution and find that countries with a richer neighborhood market export more to high-income destinations. The effect outweighs Linder's home market effect of domestic per capita income, works chiefly through the quantity margin, and is persistent across economic development levels. Moreover, I show that the non-homothetic home market effect is highly non-linear across exporter development levels, switching signs between advanced and emerging economies.

This paper examines the core-periphery divide in the support for far-right politicians in the context of French presidential elections between 2002 and 2017. We establish a significant and increasing divergence of cores and periphery in vote shares within local labor market. This phenomenon can be explained by heterogeneous effects across municipalities of a common shock to the local labor market or by heterogeneous exposure of the municipality types to the shock. We find that increased exposure to import competition from China has a small, significant effect on vote gains in the municipality. The substantial core-periphery divide prevails however also conditional on the exposure to import competition.