Studies on the determinants of the demand for higher education typically emphasizethe relevance of socio-economic factors, but leave the spatial dimensions of the prospectivestudents’ university choices largely unexplored. In this study, we investigate the determinantsof university entrance...

Transaction costs are a major reason why international trade flows are much smaller than traditional trade theory would suggest. Trust between trading partners lowers transaction costs and may therefore enhance trade. The empirical analysis of this paper shows that more trust leads to more trade...

To study the effect of the euro on international goods trade one typically estimates a panel model for the level of trade. Trade levels increase over time, and we show that this is not fully explained by the included regressors. Because the euro is only present at the end of the sample, this may...

Ineffective institutions increase transaction costs and reduce trade. This paper shows that differences in the effectiveness of institutions offer an explanation for the tendency of OECD countries to trade disproportionately with each other, and with non-OECD countries.

This paper studies the effect of institutions on trade flows, using a gravity modelapproach. We start from a standard gravity equation that incorporates geographical proximity,language, trade policy and common history. These factors reflect the costs of trade acrossgeographical and cultural...

Formal trade barriers and transport costs explain only part of the resistance to international trade. Search costs on the international market and insecurity of property rights and contract enforcement have recently been emphasized as important intangible barriers to trade. This paper proposes...

The gravity model is the workhorse model to describe and explain variation in bilateral trade patterns. Consistent with both Heckscher-Ohlin models and models of imperfect competition and trade, this versatile model has proven to be very successful, explaining a large part of the variance in...

This paper studies the intangible costs of international trade by extending the basic gravity equation with measures of cultural and institutional distance, and institutional quality. Analyzing a sample of bilateral trade flows between 92 countries in 1999, we find that institutional distance...

This paper studies the importance of intangible barriers to trade in explaining variation in disaggregate international trade. The analysis is based on a sample of 55 countries for the year 2000. We explicitly focus on the importance of institutional and cultural dimensions of distance. Our...

During the last decades, the growth of trade between China and the Netherlands has been larger than the increase in bilateral trade flows between China and most other countries. Using a time series based gravity model, this paper investigates the main determinants of this increase. The empirical...