"The impact of input-trade liberalization on firms' borrowings" with Maria Bas, Journal of Comparative Economics, 2025.
Abstract: Trade liberalization creates incentives for firms to upgrade domestic and foreign technology, embodied in imported intermediate and capital goods, which play a central role in the economic growth of developing countries. Firms require access to financial resources to pay the fixed cost of technology upgrading and sourcing foreign inputs from abroad. This paper investigates the micro-economic effects of input-trade liberalization on firms’ demand of external finance. Relying on firm-level data during India’s trade liberalization episode in the early 1990s, we present novel evidence on the relationship between exogenous changes in input tariffs across industries over time and within-firm changes in borrowings. We demonstrate that firms sourcing inputs from abroad and producing in industries that have experienced greater input tariff reductions experienced a higher increase in borrowings. The 33 percentage points decrease in input tariffs over the period is associated with almost 13 percent increase in the borrowings of firms that source inputs from abroad. This empirical finding is robust to alternative specifications that control for alternative explanations.
"Imported Inputs and Within-Firm Labor Organization"
Abstract: This paper examines the impact of imported inputs on within-firm occupational structure, within skilled and unskilled groups. Relying on administrative firm-level data from France between 2002 and 2015 and a shift-share instrumental variable strategy, I find that firms reorganize their workforce in favor of senior managers and at the expense of unskilled blue collar workers. A wider range of foreign inputs makes the production process more complex, raising the demand for skilled managers. These baseline results are robust across alternative specifications. I further show that differentiated imported varieties are complementary to senior managers, especially engineers, while homogeneous imported varieties are complementary to skilled blue-collar workers. I also highlight the distributional implications of foreign sourcing: the wage-bill share of senior managers increases at the expense of the wage-bill share of unskilled blue-collar workers. Average wages also rise across occupations, consistent with efficiency gains from internal labor reorganization that allow firms to pay higher wages throughout the occupational structure.
"How Due Diligence Shapes Firms' Imports" with Léa Marchal & Frauke Steglich .
Abstract: Mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence laws are increasingly used to regulate global value chains. This paper examines how such regulations affect firms' import decisions, using France's Duty of Vigilance Law. The law requires large firms to identify, prevent, and mitigate human rights and environmental risks throughout their supply chains. We combine French administrative data with a measure of human rights based on the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Our identification strategy exploits variation in firms' pre-reform exposure to risks. Our results indicate that, prior to the law, covered firms sourced disproportionately from high-risk markets, while following implementation, imports from risky markets declined relative to non-risky markets within the same firm. These findings provide evidence on how comprehensive due diligence requirements reshape imports and may induce trade diversion from high-risk suppliers.
"WORLD TRADE REPORT 2025: Making trade and AI work together to the benefit of all" , World Trade Organization flagship report, September 2025.
Contributed as a research assistant to the data analysis, data interpretation and literature reviews on how trade can make AI development more inclusive .