Many recent papers have pointed to ambiguous trade effects of developing regional trade agreements, calling for a reassessment of their economic merits. This paper focuses on 22 RTAs involving mostly developing countries and covering all the continents and use trade flows over the period...

In new economic geography models, geographic concentration cant arise because of workers mobility or vertical linkages between firms. We examine a setup that combines those two approaches in conjunction with local congestion costs. We find that, as trade costs are lowered, the geographic...