Trade economists traditionally study the effect of lower variable trade costs. While increasingly important politically, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) have received less attention. Viewing TBTs as fixed regulatory costs related to the entry into export markets, we use a model with...

Cultural proximity increases bilateral trade flows through a trade-cost and a bilateral-affinity (preferences) channel. Conventional measures of cultural proximity, such as common language, common religion, etc., do not allow to separately quantify those channels empirically. We argue that...

The business literature and recent descriptive evidence show that exporting firms typically require the help of foreign trade intermediaries or need to set up own foreign wholesale affiliates. In contrast, conventional trade theory models assume that producers can directly access foreign...