International trade increased rapidly after 1990, fueled by the growth of a complex network of global value chains. Financial globalization gathered force. Trade globalization, however, reversed course since the Global Financial Crisis. The new trend is expected to endure after the Global...

The effects of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are disputed. In this paper, we assess these effects using capital market data and an event-study approach, using a daily data set covering a thousand announcements spanning over eighty economies and a hundred RTAs over twenty recent years. We...

Two central topics in recent rounds of international trade negotiations have been environmental concerns, and services trade. While each is undoubtedly important, they are unrelated. In this paper I show that the services-environment link is small, for two reasons. First, services account for...

We provide a simple but novel model of trade agreements that highlights the role of transaction costs, renegotiation and dispute settlement. The model allows us to characterize the appropriate remedy for breach and whether the agreement should be structured as a system of "property rights" or...

What incentives do governments have to negotiate "new trade agreements," i.e., agreements that constrain not only governments' choices of tariffs, but also their domestic regulatory policies? We focus on horizontal product standards, i.e., those that impose requirements along a horizontal...