GeoDist makes available the exhaustive set of gravity variables used in Mayer and Zignago (2005). GeoDist provides several geographical variables, in particular bilateral distances measured using citylevel data to assess the geographic distribution of population inside each nation. We have...

This paper analyses the trade effects of restrictive product standards on the margins of trade for a large panel of French firms. To focus on restrictive product standards only, we use a new database compiling the list of measures that have been raised as concerns in dedicated committees of the...

Competitiveness has come to the forefront of the policy debate within the European Union, focusing on price competitiveness and intra-EU imbalances. But how to measure competitiveness properly, beyond price or cost competitiveness, remains an open methodological issue; and how can we explain the...

This paper studies the implications of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) proliferation. Using counterfactual estimation, we disentangle the treatment effect of one PTA on members’ trade and real income, from the externalities created by concurrent trade policy changes. Results, focusing on...

This paper questions whether the overseas expansion of a country’s retailers fosters overall bilateral exports towards these host markets. To address this question, we consider an empirical trade model, where the foreign sales of multinational retailers reduce the fixed and variable trade...

Influential empirical work by Rauch and Trindade (REStat, 2002) finds that Chinese ethnic networks of the magnitude observed in Southeast Asia increase bilateral trade by at least 60%. We argue that this estimate is upward biased due to omitted variable bias. Moreover, it is partly related to a...

Firm-level regressions show that Champagne producers that receive better ratings from wine guides also export to more markets, charge higher prices, and sell more in each market. Our method corrects for a severe selection bias predicted by the model. By using direct measures of quality, we can...

Countries no longer specialise in products or sectors, but in varieties of the same product (sold at different prices). To study the way in which the European Union copes with the emergence of new big world exporters in this context, we analyse the redistribution of world market shares at the...