Similar to bilateral or regional preferential trade agreements (PTAs), bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have proliferated over the past 50years. The purpose of this study is to provide the first systematic empirical analysis of the economic determinants of BITs and of the likelihood of BITs...

A large class of models with CES utility and iceberg trade costs are now known to generate isomorphic “gravity equations.” Economic interpretations of these gravity equations vary in terms of two basic elements: the exporter's “mass” variable and the elasticity of trade with respect to...

The establishment of a new preferential trade agreement (PTA) or the expansion of an existing one alters the incentives of non-members to participate in a PTA. This can lead to a domino effect whereby non-members join an existing PTA. Or it can lead a pair of countries to establish a new PTA. We...

This paper analyzes to which extent foreign plant ownership involves lower tax payments than domestic plant ownership. We assess hypotheses about the tax savings of endogenous foreign subsidiary ownership relative to domestic firms in a data-set of 507,542 foreign- and domestically-owned...

This paper formulates an empirical model to estimate the impact of endogenous new regional trade agreement (RTA) membership on trade structure. The likelihood of new RTA membership is influenced by economic fundamentals such as country size, factor endowments, and trade and investment costs. In...