Japan and India signed the much-awaited Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) on 16th February 2011. The CEPA will eliminate tariff on goods that account for 94% of their two way trade over ten years and will boost bilateral trade and investment. Indian exports which were subject...

We use a unique case study to estimate the effect of withdrawing from a free trade agreement on international trade. Lately, the political opposition to international economic cooperation has been on the rise, but little is known about how the withdrawal from a trade agreement affects trade. We...

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)....

The formation of regional production networks (RPNs) is one of the most important drivers of growth in East and Southeast Asia. In view of slowdown in growth and even recession in advanced economies as a result of the adverse impact of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing European...

We develop a novel two-stage methodology that allows us to study the empirical determinants of the ex post effects of past free trade agreements (FTAs) as well as obtain ex ante predictions for the effects of future FTAs. We first identify 908 unique estimates of the effects of FTAs on different...

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...

We nest an extended two-way fixed effect (ETWFE) estimator for staggered difference-in-differences within the structural gravity model. To test the ETWFE, we estimate the effects of regional trade agreements (RTAs). The results suggest that RTA estimates in the current gravity literature may be...

We show that multilateral tariff binding liberalization substantially impacts the nature and extent of Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) formation. First, it shapes the nature of forces constraining expansion of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The constraining force is a free riding incentive of...

While "mega FTAs" and WTO-driven efforts at multilateral liberalisation dominate the agenda, customs unions (CU) are the silent success story of regional integration. Throughout the world, CUs have been superseding earlier FTAs, as new unions were formed or old ones expanded. Due to problems of...