Feenstra's research is focused on the theory and estimation of international trade models, including the measurement issues that arise in these topics.
[6] In 1992, Feenstra was appointed as the director of the International Trade and Investment program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
In the article, he discussed how the gains from product variety that arise in models of international trade with monopolistic competition can be measured.
[11] The research output is summarized in the book Product Variety and the Gains from International Trade, which was initially presented as the Zeuthen Lectures, University of Copenhagen, 2007;[12] Feenstra also wrote the article "Integration of Trade and Disintegration of Production in the Global Economy" published in 1998.
In joint work with Gordon Hanson, they have discussed the employment and wage effects of offshoring, especially on workers with low skills.
[13] The research output is summarized in the book Offshoring in the Global Economy: Theory and Evidence, which was initially presented as the Ohlin Lectures, Stockholm School of Economics, 2008.
[16] In 2015, Feenstra and his coauthors published the article "The Next Generation of the Penn World Table", which appeared in the American Economic Review.
They did not find this pro-competitive effect across cities in the United States, leading to the question of what account for the difference between the U.S. and China.
[19] Feenstra explored the question in theory in a paper entitled "Restoring the Product Variety and Pro-competitive Gains from Trade with Heterogeneous Firms and Bounded Productivity", where he started with a popular class of models used in international trade that does not give rise to a pro-competitive effect of city or country size on prices.
That paper drew on "Globalization, Markups, and U.S. Welfare”, joint with David Weinstein, where they was able to measure a pro-competitive effect of import competition on prices in the United States.
Entitled "The Pro-competitive Effects of Market Size," the address drew on the theoretical and empirical results from these publications.
[21] In a 2018 paper, "In Search of the Armington Elasticity", Feenstra and co-authors address the long-standing issue in international trade of measuring the degree of substitution between goods imported from different countries, versus the degree of substitution between imported and domestically-produced goods.