During the last years, gravity equations have leapt from the trade literature over into the literature on financial markets. Martin and Rey (2004) were the first to provide a theoretical model for cross-border asset trade, yielding a structural gravity equation that could be tested empirically....

Since 1960, transport costs have been falling, but international exchange did not become less sensitive to distance. We propose the following explanation for this puzzle: in a Dixit-Stiglitz framework, a decrease in transport cost favors trade, which may increase the international specialization...

This paper studies the change in the distance elasticity of trade between 1948 and 2006. The elasticity sharply increased, when gravity equations are estimated by ordinary least squares in log form (log-OLS), while it was broadly stable or slightly increasing, depending on the specification,...

Estimations of gravity equations specified in logarithm generally conclude that the distance elasticity of trade has increased over time despite globalization. In contrast, building on Santos Silva and Tenreyro (2006), this elasticity is estimated to have been stable around 0.65-0.70 since the...

In a spatially embedded network, that is a network where nodes can be uniquely determined in a system of coordinates, links’ weights might be affected by metric distances coupling every pair of nodes (dyads). In order to assess to what extent metric distances affect relationships (link’s...