National borders reduce trade, but most estimates of the border effect seem puzzlingly large. We show that major methodological innovations of the last decade combine to shrink the border effect to a mere 28% reduction in international trade ows worldwide. The border effect varies across...

The paper analyzes the increase in transition countries’ exports to their non-traditional trade partners. It uses four different measures of product differentiation to find out the extent that the increase in product variety explains this phenomenon. It is found that opening up to new trade...

After a short background on recent developments in gravity modelling and liberalization agreements in Europe, this paper measures the trade creation and diversion effects of major European agreements based on the results of a correctly specified triple-indexed gravity model with bilateral fixed...

Since McCallum’s (1995) finding of surprisingly high border effect on trade between US and Canada, there have been a number of studies on other parts of the world, and improvements made to the gravity model to accurately measure this effect. This paper suggests some other modifications to the...

The paper analyzes the factors behind the reorientation of transition countries’ exports to their non-traditional partners outside their former block. First, the amount of reorientation is calculated using a gravity model. Then, reasons for the cross-country differences in the rate of closing...

The increase in exports to market economies is a good sign, but it is not conclusive about the extent of restructuring of production technologies experienced in transition countries. This paper explores the source of the increase with an analysis of their exports’ quality, interprets the...

After a period of growing disconnectedness of regional markets following the 1992 price liberalization in Russia, a process of improvement in market integration started since about 1994. This paper analyzes the spatial pattern of goods market integration in the country in 1994-2000,...

This paper obtains an evolving pattern of goods market integration in Russia, considering the period of economic upturn, since the second half of 2000 through the end of 2007. In an integrated market, the price of a tradable good at any location is determined by the national market, not local...

The global financial crisis has reiterated the need for Africa to build resilience to global output shocks. In this paper we examine empirically the role of intra-regional and intra-African trade linkages in being an absorber of the global output shocks in two African regional economic...

We study the impact of skilled immigrants on the employment structures of U.S. …firms using matched employer-employee data. Unlike most previous work, we use the …firm as the lens of analysis to account for a greater level of heterogeneity and the fact that many skilled immigrant admissions...