Over the last decades there has been a sizeable increase in trade and financial openness, triggered by current and capital account liberalization as well as improvements in transport and communication technologies. As a consequence, the importance of spillover effects is likely to have increased...

This article describes the development of international trade blocs world wide from the 1950s till 2010. We updated the data on international trade flows and introduced a new trade bloc variable based on the intramax hierarchical clustering technique, which defines trade blocs on actual trade...

Nowadays, an important debate in the international economies is the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change related. Discussions begin to gain the world with the signature of the Kyoto Protocol (1997), where an international agreement was reached to reduce global emissions....

Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

The paper represents a new reading of the traditional Ricardian theory of comparative advantages to tackle current challenges of environmental and climate policy. In the style of David Ricardo, it demonstrates that international trade is a positive-sum game in a twogoods, two-countries world...

The relationship between geography and trade is a central topic in international economics. This paper investigates the potential existence of a continental bias in world trade flows on a sample of 182 countries over the period 1990-2006. Using traditional estimation techniques and recent...

The essays of this book are contributions to the empirical Literature in International Trade and Public Economics. They deal with the relationship between the structure and quality of the public sector and the process of economic integration. Two of the essays add to the empirical determinants...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...