We capitalize on the latest developments in the empirical structural gravity literature to revisit the question of whether and how much does GATT/WTO membership affect international trade. We are the first to capture the non-discriminatory nature of GATT/WTO commitments by measuring the effects...

This paper is the first in the literature to examine the impact of natural disasters on trade in services. We measure the magnitude of natural disasters using two distinct sets of variables and quantify the effect of natural disasters on trade in services using a structural gravity model. We...

The geography of global value chains (GVCs) depends crucially on trade costs between countries hosting various stages of production. Some stages might be more sensitive to trade costs than others. In this paper, we exploit a value-added decomposition of bilateral trade flows to distinguish low...

The trade collapse that followed the recent financial crisis has led to a renewed interest on the measurement issues affecting international merchandise trade statistics in the new globalized economy. The international fragmentation of industrial production blurs the concept of country of origin...

This paper explores the role that quality of infrastructure has on a country's trade performance, estimating a gravity model that incorporates bilateral tariffs and a number of indicators for the quality of infrastructure. The paper looks at the impact of the quality of infrastructure (road,...

We try to achieve this objective in four steps. First, we focus on the original Armington CES gravity model, as a representative framework for a large class of GE models, to offer a deep analysis of the structural relationships underlying the general equilibrium gravity system, and how they can...

Then, we integrate the latest developments in the empirical gravity literature and we offer six recommendations to obtain reliable partial equilibrium estimates of the effects of bilateral and non-discriminatory trade policies within the same comprehensive, and theoretically-consistent...

The WTO's plurilateral Information Technology Agreement (ITA) reduced tariffs to zero on many IT products. This paper presents a comprehensive study of its trade impacts by incorporating recent insights from both the global value chain (GVC) and time in trade literatures. Inserting tariffs...

In this paper we examine the impact of major disasters on international trade flows using a gravity model. Our panel data consists of more than 170 countries for the years 1962-2004 yielding approximately 300,000 observations. We find that the driving forces determining the impact of such events...

This paper examines the impact of telecommunications liberalization in Africa on both sectoral performance and economic growth. Besides unilateral measures, we account for WTO commitments fostering the credibility of reforms. Actual regulatory quality plays a major role in bringing down prices...