The effects of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are disputed. In this paper, we assess these effects using capital market data and an event-study approach, using a daily data set covering a thousand announcements spanning over eighty economies and a hundred RTAs over twenty recent years. We...

Many new exporters give up exporting very shortly, despite substantial entry costs; others shoot up foreign sales and expand to new destinations. We develop a model based on experimentation to rationalize these and other dynamic patterns of exporting firms. We posit that individual export...

Antidumping actions in the United States and EU are known to be linked to macroeconomic conditions. In part, this is because positive injury findings may be easier to make in a downturn. We explore the evidence for Mexico, one of the main ‘new’ antidumping-using countries. Injury...

Worker industry affiliation plays a crucial role in how trade policy affects wages in many trade models. Yet, most research has focused on how trade policy affects wages by altering the economy-wide returns to a specific worker characteristic (i.e. skill or education) rather than through...

All preferential trading agreements (PTAs) short of a customs union use Rules of Origin (RoO) to prevent trade deflection. RoO raise production costs and create administrative costs. This Paper argues that in the case of the recent wave of North-South PTAs, the presence of RoO virtually limits...

To study the effects of tariffs on GDP one needs import demand elasticities at the tariff line level that are consistent with GDP maximization. These do not exist. We modify Kohli’s (1991) GDP function approach to estimate demand elasticities for 4625 imported goods in 117 countries. Following...

This paper addresses the final steps to global free trade – what they might look like, what sort of political economy forces might drive them, and what the WTO might do to guide them. Two facts form the point of departure: 1) Regionalism is here to stay; world trade is regulated by a motley...

Exporters’ performance in a particular market may affect their future exports to the rest of the world. Importers may base their future transaction decisions upon the information revealed by exporters’ past performance in other countries. Similarly, exporters acquire valuable information on...

Most of the large tariff reductions achieved in multilateral trade negotiations have involved tariff-cutting formulas such as the ‘Swiss’ formula. Wide variations in initial tariff rates between active participants, however, call for new approaches under the Doha Development Agenda. This...

The economics literature provides ample evidence that higher corruption discourages FDI inflows. In this paper we address, for the first time in the literature in a systematic way, the exact reverse link, i.e., the empirical effect of FDI inflows on corruption. We present a simple model that...