This paper discusses the design, implementation and use of standards from the perspective of transaction costs economics. A proper design and implementation of standards may lead to a considerable reduction of transaction costs, which enhances trade and, consequently, economic welfare. A major...

Increased spatial dependency of economic activities, as well as spatial differentiation of production and consumption, has implication for environmental policy. One of the issues that has gained importance is the responsibility for the emissions from products that cross national boundaries...

This paper studies the intangible costs of international trade by extending the basic gravity equation with measures of cultural and institutional distance, and institutional quality. Analyzing a sample of bilateral trade flows between 92 countries in 1999, we find that institutional distance...

We study the implications of the Chinese waste import ban of 2018 on intraEuropean plastic waste trade. Specifically, we ask if it led to a "waste haven" effect, which would imply that countries with high disposal and recycling costs started to export more plastic waste to countries with lower...

We embed a competitive search model with labor market discrimination, or nepotism, into a two-sector, two-country framework in order to analyze how labor market discrimination impacts the pattern of international trade and also how trade trade affects discrimination. Discrimination, or nepotism,...

Today’s global world is characterized not only by a high volume ofinternational trade and foreign investment relativeto national income, but also by a changed composition of that tradetowards a greater fraction of trade in inputs andcapital goods and outsourcing of production.. Emphasized is...

Is there a case to be made for preferential treatment of the exposed sector in an economy when compliance to an aggregate emissions constraint induced by an international environmental agreement is mandatory? This question is being debated in many countries, including The Netherlands, in the...

We depart from the trade and wages literature and its emphasis on North-South trade, examining North-North by developing the basic linkages between trade-based integration and relative wages in an Ethier-type division of labor model. Using this model we identify a formal relationship between...