We develop a new theoretical framework of trade agreement (TA) formation, called a ‘parallel contest', that emphasizes the political fight over TA ratification within countries. TA ratification is inherently uncertain in each country, where anti- and pro-trade interest groups contest each...

This paper reviews the most significant recent developments in the theory of trade agreements. The paper offers an integrated approach to evaluating trade agreements, and uses the approach to present results on preferential and multilateral trade agreements. The paper identifies also several...

This paper investigates the determinants of the different forms taken by regional integration in different parts of the world. This raises the issue of the relationship between economic and political integration. The theoretical model shows that, in an insecure world, the interplays between...

This paper proposes a stylized model of policy determination and imperfect international integration. A country-specific policy wedge corrects labor market imperfections and/or redistributes welfare across differently wealthy agents. Capital market integration with the rest of the world, indexed...

In a seminal paper, Rose (2004) found that the assumed positive impact of the WTO on international trade was questionable. This finding has been scrutinized and modified in subsequent research, using different datasets, econometric methods and separating the WTO from other forms of trade...

We address the trade effect of restrictive product standards on the margins of trade, by matching a detailed panel of French firm exports with a new database compiling the list of Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary regulatory measures that have been raised as a concern in dedicated committees of the...

This paper intends to combine two fields in the economic literature by examining empirically the FDI pattern – horizontal versus vertical – within the European Union and the relevance of trade integration as a potential determinant of investment flows over the period 1995-2009. We capture...

The economic effects from labor market integration are crucially affected by the extent to which countries are open to trade. In this paper we build a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with trade in goods and labor mobility across countries to study and quantify the economic...