In a two-country international trade model with oligopolistic competition, we study the conditions on market structure and trade costs under which a merger policy designed to benefit domestic consumers is too tough or too lenient from the viewpoint of the foreign country. Calibrating the model...

For a long time, China's impressive growth performance has been driven by investment and high productivity gains. Based on the recent discussion on possible overcapacities and overinvestment in China, the paper investigates the sustainability of China's investment- and export-driven growth...

Trade facilitation policy focuses on accelerated and transparent shipment processing to reduce trade costs. A common measure to evaluate processing frictions is the time it takes to import. In this paper we translate import processing times to costs. Our theory considers that shipment processing...

How does import protection affect export performance? In trade models with scale economies, import liberalization can reduce industry-level exports by cutting domestic production. We show that this export destruction mechanism reduced US export growth following the permanent normalization of...

Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous – “trade-cost elasticity” plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow...

Using a novel common econometric specification, we examine the measurement of three important effects in international trade that historically have been addressed largely separately: the (partial) effects on trade of economic integration agreements, national borders, and bilateral distance....

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...