Politicians travel extensively abroad, for various reasons. One purpose of external visits is to improve bilateral economic relations. In this paper, I examine the effect of state visits on international trade. I use a large data set covering the travel activities of the heads of state of...

Standard trade theory suggests that Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) could disrupt trade between members and non-members. However, the trade diversion effects of FTAs have not been thoroughly examined empirically. Using a novel empirical approach, we confirm that FTAs that entered into force...

Using NAFTA as an illustrating example, I show that heterogeneity in the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) both within and across agreements is not very well understood. Not only has NAFTA reduced trade frictions significantly more than other FTAs, but each NAFTA member country has enjoyed...

This volume is a collection of papers that apply general equilibrium theory in order to obtain policy relevant insights on topical issues of international trade and migration. The first set of papers focuses on European integration, applying dynamic numerical general equilibrium methods to...

This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...

We estimate geographic barriers to trade in nine service categories for Canada's provinces from 1997 to 2007 with novel high quality bilateral provincial trade data. The border directly reduces average provincial trade with the US relative to interprovincial trade to 2.4% of its borderless...