This study uses a new, innovative measure of trade protection and finds that less trade protection is associated with higher income per capita, using data from 131 developed and developing countries.

Recently the Bank has provided new indicators for monitoring the extent to which agricultural policies restrict international trade in farm goods. They come from two studies with differing methodologies and data sources, and each provides less-than-perfect estimates. This note shows how and...

This paper uses computational techniques to assess whether or not various propositions that have been advanced as plausible in the literature on regional trade agreements may actually hold. The idea is to make probabilistic statements as to whether propositions of interest might hold, rather...

There has been great focus in the recent trade theory literature on the introduction of firm heterogeneity into trade models. However, these models tend to rely heavily on symmetry assumptions and assume melting iceberg transport costs as the only form of trade restrictions. Moreover, a standard...

The key result of the so-called New Trade Theory is that countries gain from falling trade costs by an increase in the number of varieties available to consumers. Though the number of varieties in a given country rises, it is also true that global variety decreases from increased competition...

There has been great focus in the recent trade theory literature on the introduction of firm heterogeneity into trade models. This introduction has highlighted the importance of the entry/exit decision of firms in response to changes in trade barriers. However, it is typical in many of these...

Recent theoretical work suggests that the presence of foreign direct investment (FDI) lowers a country's noncooperative Nash tariff. To test this hypothesis, we first adapt the theoretical model formulated by Blanchard (2010) to derive an intuitive, empirically testable equation. This equation...

Based on the observation that industries are often geographically concentrated, this paper proposes a new political economy model of trade protection. We associate the sectors of a specific factors model with electoral districts populated by continua of heterogeneous voters who differ in their...

This paper examines the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, we extend the `protection for sale' model to allow for different...

This paper analyses the relationship between firm productivity and export behavior in German manufacturing firms. We examine whether productivity increases the probability of exporting, and assert that there is a causal relationship from high productivity to entering foreign markets, as...