Suppose that when addressing the question of “what's left for the WTO?,” negotiators relied not on the agenda established in 2001 but instead on the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements to identify tariff negotiating priorities. This paper uses the lens of the terms-of-trade theory to...

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...

Barriers to international trade are known to be large but due to data limitations it is hard to measure them directly for a large number of countries over many years. To address this problem I derive a micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs that indirectly infers trade frictions from...

We extend the trade restrictiveness index approach to the case of market imperfections and domestic regulations addressing them. We focus on standard-like non-tariff measures (NTMs) affecting cost of production and potentially enhancing demand by reducing negative externalities. We apply the...

We study the occurrence of holdout litigation in the context of sovereign defaults. The number of creditor lawsuits against foreign governments has strongly increased over the past decades, but there is a large variation across crisis events. Why are some defaults followed by a “run to the...

Recent adoption of competition laws across the globe has highlighted the importance of institutional considerations for antitrust effectiveness and the need for comparative institutional analyses of antitrust that extend beyond matters of substantive law. Contributing to the resulting nascent...

Are product standards protectionism in disguise? This paper estimates the costs of non-compliance with U.S. product standards, using a new database on U.S. import refusals from 2002 to 2012. We find that import refusals significantly decrease exports to the United States. This trade reducing...

This paper investigates the sources and size of trade barriers at the industry level. We derive a micro-founded measure of industry-specific bilateral trade integration that has an in-built control for time-varying multilateral resistance. This trade integration measure is consistent with a...