A large body of empirical research finds that a pair of regions within a country tends to trade 10 to 20 times as much as an otherwise identical pair of regions across countries. In the context of the standard trade models, the large “border effect” is problematic, because it is consistent...

A large empirical literature finds that there is too little international trade, and too much intra-national trade to be rationalized by observed international trade costs such as tariffs and transport costs. The literature uses frameworks in which goods are assumed to be produced in just one...

In this paper the authors study the economic evolution between 1960 and 1995 of two states in India — Maharashtra and West Bengal. In 1960, West Bengal’s per capita income exceeded that of Maharashtra. By 1995, it had fallen to just 69 percent of Maharashtra’s per capita income. The...

Recent empirical research finds that pairs of countries with stronger trade linkages tend to have more highly correlated business cycles. We assess whether the standard international business cycle framework can replicate this intuitive result. We employ a three-country model with transportation...

South Korea's growth miracle has been well documented. A large set of institutional and policy reforms in the early 1960s is thought to have contributed to the country's extraordinary performance. In this paper, the authors assess the importance of one key set of policies, the trade policy...