Aeroplanes are a fast but expensive means of shipping goods, which allow producers to respond quickly to favourable demand realisations and to limit the risk of shipping unproÖtably large quantities during low demand periods while substantially raising the transportation cost relative to ocean...

This paper explores patterns of quality differentiation and specialization relying on model-level panel data of retail sales and prices of refrigerators across 23 countries in the European Union. Unlike customs data aggregated at the product category, typically used in the literature,...

China's exports have become increasingly sophisticated. This has generated anxiety in developed countries as the competitive pressure may be increasingly felt outside labor-intensive industries. Using product-level data on exports from different cities within China, this paper investigates the...

Although there exists a vast literature on convergence and divergence of income levels across countries or regions at the aggregate level, there is only little work on convergence and/or diver- gence processes of productivity and wage levels at the more disaggregated industrial level. These are...

Does what you exported matter? We build a new global commodity-level export database for the previous era of globalization and find persistence in productive capabilities proxied by economic complexity, export diversification, and sophistication across a century. We also show that productive...

This paper investigates efficiency losses caused by independent tax systems and proposes ways of remedying this coordination failure Whereas the harmful effects of tariff competition have been thoroughly explored in the trade policy literature little is known about the externalities that result...

Since the mid-1980s a substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO or regional trade agreements, especially the EU. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature...

Competition policy emerged as an important area of interest during the later stages of Uruguay Round negotiations. The task of establishing competition policy is complicated by the fact that there already are trade statutes---antidumping, countervailing duty, safeguard actions---that relate to...

We study the determinants of trade policy decisions focusing specifically on antidumping and countervailing duty statutes administered by the International Trade Commission (ITC). Using detailed industry, import, and political pressure data we model ITC decision making, weighing the relative...

This paper examines the relationship between currency internationalisation and economic structure. It argues that the hierarchical and asymmetric architecture of the international monetary system imposes a "survival constraint" upon non-centre countries that obliges them to generate net inflows...