This study revisits the trade and welfare effects of 19th century bilateralism exploiting the latest developments in structural gravity models, including the consideration of domestic trade. Using bilateral trade data between 1855 and 1875, I show that the Cobden-Chevalier network, i.e. a system...

During the long process of negotiation after the 2016 Brexit referendum there was a high uncertainty about the final shape of bilateral trade relations between the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK), especially for particular sectors and firms. Given this context, the paper explores...

This paper estimates the dynamic aggregate effect of exogenous shocks to two key components of public expenditure in the United States: government income transfers and government spending. The identification strategy positions the structural shocks to public expenditures in an SVAR framework...

We show how policy uncertainty and conflict-related shocks impact the dynamics of economic activity (GDP) in Russia. We use alternative indicators of “conflict”, relating to specific aspects of this general concept: geopolitical risk, social unrest, outbreaks of political violence and...

Does distance matter for the volatility of international real and financial transactions? We show that it does, in addition to its well-established relevance for the level of trade. A simple model of trade with endogenous markups shows that demand shocks have a larger impact on trade between...

International trade in manufacturing goods has risen strongly over the past decades, contributing to the expansion of global value chains (GVCs). This paper studies how two factors contributed to this rise since 1970: (i) declining “border effects” that are arguably related to the ICT...

The paper provides an ex-post analysis of the determinants of within-country regional heterogeneity of the labour market impact of COVID-19. By focussing on the first wave of the pandemic in the four largest euro area economies, it finds that the propagation of the economic impact across regions...