We develop and test a theory of efficient international trade. Efficiency gains arise through lower trade costs faced by 'trade specialists', whose superiority over 'common traders' manifests itself through lower trade costs. To test our theory, we construct and deploy a novel dataset based on...

German-Pakistani relations cannot be analyzed in isolation of the larger domestic and international trajectories, economic and political, on both sides of the partnership. After a recent democratic power transfer in 2013, Pakistan continues to face complex challenges. The instable security...

In this paper, we discuss the agricultural trade between Brazil and China. We select a set of key commodities and debate whether there are obstacles or opportunities to increase trade between the two economies. Following an institutional and historical analysis, we provide a statistical...

This review summarizes the empirical literature on the effects of natural disasters and weather variations on international trade flows. A first result is that the body of literature is actually not as small as previously suggested. In total, I summarize 19 studies of 18 independent research...

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...

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the natural resource curse, which postulates a negative link between natural resource abundance and economic growth. It shows empirically that resource-rich countries appear to have a less developed financial system and investigates a potential...

Was the collapse of world trade between 1928 and 1937 caused by higher transport costs, increased protectionism or the collapse of the gold standard? Using recent advances in the estimation of gravity equations, I examine the partial and general equilibrium effects of bilateral distance,...

In this article, we discuss the current pattern of territorial reconfiguration of the Brazilian industry, its current forms, and motivations in order to problematize some of the most significant challenges of the current regional issue. We have brought new evidence of how it keeps...

The finding that industrial sectors differ in their dependence on external finance for sector-specific technological reasons and, thus, rely to a different degree on financial development has become a major concept in studies conducted on both growth and trade. Although natural resources might...

We exploit proprietary information on severed correspondent banking relationships - due to the stricter enforcement of financial crime regulation - to assess how payment disruptions impede cross-border trade. Using firm-level export data from emerging Europe, we show that when local respondent...