We provide evidence indicating that countries with well-developed social security systems do not necessarily face a trade-off between social spending and competitiveness. On average, countries that spend a lot on social needs score well in the competitiveness league. We investigate the...

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 and...

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)....

This paper proposes a new panel data structural gravity approach for estimating the trade and welfare effects of Brexit. The suggested Constrained Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood Estimator exhibits some useful properties for trade policy analysis and allows to obtain estimates and confidence...

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...

How do shifts in the global balance of power shape the world economy? We propose a theory of alignment-based “hegemonic globalization,” built on two central premises: countries differ in their preferences over policies (such as the rule of law or regulatory frameworks) and trade between any...

We use a quantitative model to study the implications of European integration for welfare and migration flows across 1,318 regions. The model suggests that an increase of trade barriers to the level of 1957 reduces welfare by about 1-2 percent on average, depending on the presumed trade...

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

Trade data are typically reported at the level of regions or countries and are therefore aggregates across space. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of standard gravity estimation to spatial aggregation. We build a model in which initially symmetric micro regions are combined to form...

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....