Typically, economics assumes that property rights over productive resources or goods are perfectly defined and costlessly enforced. The costs of insecurity and the resultant conflict are, however, real and often economically significant. In this paper, we examine how international trade regimes...

We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased trafficking profits of Mexican cartels, resulting in violent competition among them. We test this hypothesis by comparing changes in drug-related homicides after NAFTA's introduction...

Three years ago, very few economists would have imagined that one of the newest and fastest growing research areas in international trade is the use of quantitative trade models to estimate the economic welfare losses from dissolutions of major countries' economic integration agreements (EIAs)....

China has defied the declining trend in domestic content in exports in many countries. We study China's rising domestic content in exports using firm- and customs transaction-level data. Our approach embraces firm heterogeneity and hence reduces aggregation bias. We find that the substitution of...

This paper proposes a unique overview of trade policies trends since the launch of the Doha Round, based on detailed data on tariffs and trade covering 130 countries. We show that regionalism has delivered limited effective liberalization so far, leading to only a 0.3 percentage point (p.p.) cut...

Quantitative results from a large class of international trade models depend critically on the elasticity of trade with respect to trade frictions. We develop a simulated method of moments estimator to estimate this elasticity from disaggregate price and trade-flow data using the Ricardian...

This paper empirically investigates the effect of the EU-South Korea free trade agreement (FTA) on manufacturing trade flows. By applying a state-of-the-art structural gravity model with intranational (i.e., domestic) trade and using disaggregated data, we quantify both the trade impact and the...

We build on the latest developments in the structural gravity literature to quantify the partial and general equilibrium effects of GATT/WTO membership on trade and welfare. Using an extensive database covering manufacturing trade for 186 countries over the period 1980-2016, we find that the...

We propose a simple and flexible econometric approach to quantify ex-ante the "deep" impact of trade liberalization and the "hard" effects of protection with the empirical structural gravity model. Specifically, we argue that the difference between the estimates of border indicator variables for...

We examine how trade openness influences income inequality within countries. The sample includes 139 countries over the period 1970-2014. We employ predicted openness as instrument to deal with the endogeneity of trade openness. The effect of trade openness on income inequality differs across...