This paper presents evidence on the determinants of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in services sectors. It develops a stylized model of mergers and acquisitions that predicts that the incidence of merger and acquisition deals depends, inter alia, on the target economy's size, industrial...

This paper presents evidence on the determinants of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in services sectors. It develops a stylized model of mergers and acquisitions that predicts that the incidence of merger and acquisition deals depends, inter alia, on the target economy's size, industrial...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries, and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to infer border barriers flexibly are often missing for services, this paper derives a novel methodology for projecting output data. The...

This paper examines how policy governing the liner shipping sector affects maritime transport costs and seaborne trade flows. The paper uses a novel data set and finds that restrictions, particularly on foreign investment, increase maritime transport costs, strongly but unevenly. The...

The costs of shipping containerized cargo on liner vessels play a pivotal role in determining a country's integration into international trade. We examine how policy governing the liner shipping sector affects maritime transport costs and seaborne trade flows. Using a novel data set of services...

Surprisingly little is known about policies that affect international trade in services. Previous analyses have focused on policy commitments made by countries in international agreements, but in many cases, these commitments do not reflect actual policy. This paper describes a new initiative to...

A new cross-country database on services policy reveals a perverse pattern: many landlocked countries restrict trade in the very services that connect them with the rest of the world. On average, telecommunications and air-transport policies are significantly more restrictive in landlocked...

A new Services Trade Restrictions Database collects and makes publicly available information on services trade policy assembled in a comparable manner across 103 countries, five sectors (telecommunications, finance, transportation, retail and professional services) and the key modes of service...

Surprisingly little is known about policies that affect international trade in services. Previous analyses have focused on policy commitments made by countries in international agreements but these commitments do not in many cases reflect actual policy. This paper describes a new initiative to...