Despite economists' nearly universal support for free trade policies, the general public has serious reservations about free trade. To understand this opposition, one must understand the preferences of individuals as they relate to the policy choices of policymakers. Ideally, one would like to...

The trade liberalization associated with NAFTA has affected the pattern of state exports by altering the origin as well as the destination of merchandise exports. We find that NAFTA has increased US merchandise exports to Mexico and Canada by just over 15 percent, and has increased total US...

This paper examines a topic of increasing interest, the potential determinants of extensive (i.e., number of firms) and intensive (i.e., average exports per firm) trade margins, using state-level trade to 190 countries. In addition to distance and country size, other factors affecting trade...

Ethnic networks?as proxies for information networks?have been associated with higher levels of international trade. Previous research has not differentiated between the roles of these networks on the extensive and intensive margins. The present paper does so using a model with fixed effects,...

Many studies have found that international borders represent large barriers to trade. But how do international borders compare to domestic border barriers? We investigate international and domestic border barriers in a unified framework. We consider a unique data set of exports from individual...

Measuring the overall restrictiveness of a country's international trade policies is important and, in fact, essential for estimating the effects of trade policies and for negotiations to reduce trade barriers. A good measure is also difficult to produce: Trade restrictiveness indices are...