Until recently, government procurement bidding processes have generally favored domestic firms by awarding the contract to a domestic firm even if a foreign firm tenders a lower bid, so long as the difference between the two is sufficiently small. This has been replaced by an agreement...

The proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and the United States of America would be the largest preferential trade agreement in the world. Encompassing almost half of world GDP, it will have strong economic effects on Germany. In this paper, we...

When natural gas prices are subject to periodic decoupling from oil prices, for instance due to peak-load pricing, conventional linear models of price dynamics such as the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) can lead to erroneous inferences about cointegration relationships, price adjustments...

This paper highlights the severity of China’s AD problems, and high concentration of AD actions taken by the top initiators, noting that China can offer a higher level of economic integration in an RTA in exchange for improved regional AD provisions. Case studies on RTAs give precedents in...

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...

Since July 2013, the EU and the US have been negotiating a preferential trade agreement (PTA), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We use a multi-country, multi-industry Ricardian trade model with national and international input-output linkages to quantify its potential...

We develop a new model of trade in which educational institutions drive comparative advantage and determine the distribution of human capital within and across countries. Our framework exploits a multiplicity of sectors and the continuous support of human capital choices to demonstrate that...

The introduction of containerization triggered complementary technological and organizational changes that revolutionized global freight transport. Despite numerous claims about the importance of containerization in stimulating international trade, econometric estimates on the effects of...