As of November 10th, 2024 Alejandra Martinez Cubillos is no longer a current member of the department

My letter writers are: Prof. Dennis Novy, Prof. Carlo Perroni, Prof. Isabelle Mejean and Prof. Christine Braun

Working papers

Trade Relationships During and After a Crisis: Evidence from Road Disruptions in Colombian Flower Exports (Job Market paper)

I study the impact of an extreme weather event on international trade relationships. Exploiting variation in exporters' access to cargo terminals during an unprecedented La Niña season in 2010-2011, when some roads became impassable, I find that relationships exposed to road disruptions became 7 to 9 percentage points less likely to end during the shock, with no differential effects afterwards. Relationships associated with importers who were exposed to the shock on multiple relationships were more likely to end in the medium and long run. I present a theoretical framework that rationalizes these empirical results based on (1) the relative cost of establishing a new trade relationship (2) the proportion of relationships in firms' portfolios that are exposed to the shock. The findings shed light on the dynamic of transnational buyer-seller relationships in the context of extreme weather events.

Work in progress

Transitivity in Trade (with Carlo Perroni and Dennis Novy)

A large literature on social networks shows that individuals are more likely connected with each other if they share connections with other individuals. We take this idea to trade between firms. Firms are more likely to trade with each other if they share common trading partners, and forming a new connection makes trade with other partners more likely. We provide a statistically based characterisation of transitivity in trade transactions that is applicable to any model of trade where the formation of agent-to-agent links involves a stochastic component (e.g., arising from random search or random matching), and discuss how transitivity can be measured in transactions data. We apply this methodology to firm-level Colombia-US exporter-importer data. Our results suggest that there is a transitivity effect in trade relationships for Colombian exporters located at shorter distances between partners. We quantify the magnitude of the transitivity effect by using the panel nature of the trade data, relying on an instrumental variable approach.

Non-academic Publications

"How Global Value Chains became victims of Covid-19", 2020, with Isabelle Mejean and Elie Gerschel, European Financial Review

"Propagations of Shocks in Global Value Chains: The Coronavirus Case", 2020, with Elie Gerschel and Isabelle Mejean. IPP Policy Brief. No. 53. Publication

In the Press:

• Financial Times, 04/06/2020 – Pandemic exposes Europe’s reliance on importsLink opens in a new window
• Institut de l’Enterprise, 16/04/2020 – La crise du coronavirus dans un monde de production fragmentéeLink opens in a new window

"The cost of Brexit uncertainty: Missing partners from French exporters", 2019, with Julien Martin and Isabelle Mejean. IPP Policy Brief. No.48. Publication

In the Press:

• Le Monde, 30/01/2020 – Brexit: les entreprises françaises prêtes à faire le deuil du Royaume-UniLink opens in a new window
• AFP, 28/01/2020 – Le Brexit pourrait rebattre les cartes des chaînes de production en Europe – via L’ExpressLink opens in a new window – via Le Quotidien.luLink opens in a new window