In April 2025, President Trump announced US tariff increases. While the literature has been preoccupied with security of supply, the tariffs brought attention to export dependency. In the EU, one of the sectors with a high export dependency on the US is the wine sector. Leveraging high frequency export data on the universe of Italian wine exporters, this paper sheds new light on firm and product heterogeneity. Overall, we find that Italian wine exporters suffered both in export volume and prices, especially those who were dependent on the US market. At the product level, differentiated wines with Geographical Indications such as Chianti and Prosecco suffered less. In terms of the dynamics of the response, we find clear evidence of anticipatory stockpiling in the US, followed by a slump in imports. Overall, the data shows that export dependency is costly in times of rising protectionism, especially for less diversified commodities.

This paper examines whether diversification in import sourcing increases resilience to upstream shocks. Using annual global trade data and weekly data on Swiss importing firms, we assess how diversification before an upstream shock mitigates import disruptions. Guided by a global sourcing framework in which the resilience benefits of diversification depend on the cross-country correlation of upstream shocks, we estimate a structural gravity model and report three empirical findings regarding the 2020 pandemic and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as exogenous shocks. First, both shocks significantly reduce the growth rate of imports. Second, importers with greater pre-shock source diversification experience smaller import contractions during both disruptions. Third, the buffering effect of diversification depends on the cross-country correlation of the shock. Diversification generates a resilience cushion of approximately 25-46 percentage points during the relatively lower-correlated Russia-Ukraine shock, compared with about 9 percentage points during the more highly correlated COVID-19 shock. The results align at both the macro and micro levels, enhancing the external validity of our findings and positioning diversification as a scalable resilience strategy whose effectiveness, nevertheless, depends critically on whether alternative sourcing locations are exposed to the same underlying shock.

This project estimates food-supply elasticities in Sub-Saharan Africa using commodity-storage theory and exogenous weather shocks as instruments. We combine data from FAO, USDA, WFP, and public climate sources to study three commodities across 173 food markets in 34 countries.

The analysis examines how weather events affect food supplies and prices, and how responses differ across crops and markets. The findings suggest that food supply in Sub-Saharan Africa is more elastic than global food supply, while prices are especially exposed to exogenous weather shocks. The project highlights the role of storage, imports, and market infrastructure in smoothing consumption and reducing production uncertainty.

We examine how global wheat market shocks are transmitted to firm-level export prices of pasta and related wheat-based products. Empirically, we estimate a Bayesian SVAR model for the global wheat market using quarterly data from 1970 to 2022. The model identifies structural supply and demand shocks linked to global economic fundamentals, including production, energy costs, economic activity, inventories, and consumption. We then relate these shocks to Italian customs microdata on firm-level export prices over 2004–2022. Our results highlight that the transmission of global wheat market shocks to downstream food prices depends critically on the nature of the shock, with demand-side disruptions playing a more prominent role than supply-side shocks. Among demand-side shocks, global economic activity shocks exert the largest effect, increasing export price growth by 3.3 percent, followed by energy price shocks (1.2 percent) and wheat-specific demand shocks (1.0 percent). By contrast, a one-standard-deviation positive wheat supply shock lowers export price growth by 0.7 percent, while a negative precautionary demand shock reduces it by about 0.4 percent. Pass-through is broadly uniform across firm size, domestic or import sourcing strategy, and destination market. It is weaker, however, for other wheat-derived products, consistent with greater product differentiation and higher input substitutability.

We examine how standards and technical regulations affect firm-level export margins in selected African countries. The project combines detailed customs transaction data at the firm-product level with bilateral information on non-tariff measures in a gravity-model framework.

The results indicate no statistically meaningful effect on the extensive margin of firm-level trade, but a negative effect on intensive-margin trade in both agriculture and manufacturing. Smaller firms are more affected, and consumable goods face larger effects than intermediate goods. The analysis also suggests that higher initial product quality can mitigate trade-reducing effects in manufacturing.