Vingt-cinq ans après l’abolition de toutes les barrières formelles « traditionnelles » au commerce (droits de douane et quotas principalement), le passage au Marché unique était censé assurer qu’au 1er janvier 1993 le commerce entre États membres serait libre de toute entrave. Il...

In this paper, we measure market access between the United States, the EU, and Japan (the Triad), using the effect of national borders on trade patterns. We investigate overall and industry-level trends of bilateral trade openness and provide explanations for those using proxies for bilateral...

This paper develops a method of assessment of market access difficulties with an application to manufactured trade patterns between developing and developed countries. The method also offers a renewal of the assessment of the impact of regional trading arrangements. We use a micro-founded...

This paper analyzes empirically a public policy promoting industrial clusters in France. Cluster policies have become popular in many countries but have not been extensively evaluated. We propose in this paper the first quantitative evaluation of a cluster policy exploiting firm-level data. We...

This paper analyzes empirically the effect of spatial agglomeration of activities on plant-level productivity, using French firm and plant-level data from 1996 to 2004. We exploit short-run variations of variables by making use of GMM estimation. This allows us to control for endogeneity biases...

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how market size and ge- ography (the market sizes of and bilateral economic distances to trading partners) affect both a firm's exported product range and its exported product mix across market destinations (the dis- tribution...

This paper develops a theoretical model of location choice under imperfect competition to formalize the notion that firms prefer to locate “where the markets are.” The profitability of a location depends on a term that weights demand in all locations by accessibility. Using a sample of...

In addition to standard trade gains, regional trade agreements (RTAs) can promote peaceful relations by increasing the opportunity cost of conflicts. Country pairs with large trade gains from RTAs and a high probability of conflict should be more likely to sign an RTA. Using data from 1950 to...

L'ouverture de l'économie française et, plus généralement, son insertion dans le mouvement généralement qualifié de mondialisation sont des préoccupations constantes de l'opinion et ceci a déjà trouvé un écho dans plusieurs numéros consacrés à la question par Économie et...

This chapter examines empirical strategies that have been or could be used to evaluate the importance of agglomeration and trade models. This theoretical approach, widely known as “New Economic Geography” (NEG), emphasizes the interaction between transport costs and firm-level scale...