In the Belle Époque, Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom, but growth in output per capita was lackluster. We seek to reconcile this ostensible paradox. Because of the sharp decline in both fixed and variable trade costs, the trade boom was as much about the expansion in the number of...

A large body of cross-country empirical evidence identifies monetary policy and trade integration as key determinants of business cycle co-movement. Partially consistent with this, many argue that the re-emergence of the gold standard allowed for the global transmission of a deflationary shock...

The received view pins the adoption of labor regulation before 1914 on domestic forces. Using directed dyad-year event history analysis, we find that trade was also a pathway of diffusion. Market access served as an important instrument to encourage a level playing field. The type of trade...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...

What drives globalization today and in the past? We employ a new micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs based on a standard model of trade in differentiated goods to address this question. These trade costs gauge the difference between observed bilateral trade and frictionless trade....

It is generally very difficult to measure the effects of a currency depreciation on a country's balance sheet and financing costs given the endogenous properties of the exchange rate. History provides at least one natural experiment to test whether an exogenous exchange rate depreciation can be...

Motivated by evidence on the importance of incomplete information and networks in international trade, we investigate the supply of 'network intermediation.' We hypothesize that the agents who become international trade intermediaries first accumulate networks of foreign contacts while working...

A network/search view of international trade in differentiated products is proposed. It is shown that this view can explain the importance of ethnic and extended family ties in trade, the success of diversified trading intermediaries such as Japan's sogo shosha, and the ubiquity of government...

I propose a network/search view of international trade in differentiated products. I present evidence that supports the view that proximity and common language/colonial ties are more important for differentiated products than for products traded on organized exchanges in matching international...