Free trade agreements lead to a rise in bilateral trade regardless of whether the signatories are developed or developing countries. Furthermore, the percentage increase in bilateral trade is higher for South-South agreements than for North-South agreements. In this paper, the results are robust...

This paper characterizes the trade performance of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over the past 15 years. Cross-section results show that MENA's exports to the outside world were only one third of their potential in recent years, after controlling for the standard determinants of trade....

While intermediates comprise the majority of total goods trade in the European Union (EU), their share of total trade has remained flat since 1996. This implies that EU enlargement has had a limited effect on the size of Factory Europe. However, enlargement coincides with an increase in Factory...

Nigerian data from the early 2000s indicates that formal sector earnings are about 70% higher than informal sector earnings but, for men, part of this is due to an educational composition effect. The returns to education are lower in the informal sector than in the formal sector, but mainly at...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-section of developing and advanced countries. Regressions of either private-sector employment rates or unemployment rates on two measures of...

This paper constructs country-level aggregates of trade facilitation measures from firm-level responses in the Enterprise Surveys and compares them with the Doing Business indicators, the Logistics Performance Index and the Enabling Trade Index.  Correlations between the data sources are low...

Free trade agreements (FTAs) lead to a rise in bilateral trade even if the signatories include developing countries.  Furthermore, the percentage increase in bilateral trade is higher for South-South agreements than for North-South agreements.  The results are robust across a number of gravity...

Drawing on a new and comprehensive measure of logistics quality, our gravity model suggests logistics in the exporting and partner-country can have an important impact on bilateral exports.  A one standard deviation improvement in the exporter's logistics quality, which for example would...

Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) showed the importance of multilateral resistance general equilibrium effects in estimating the response of trade flows to trade costs. We integrate this into Helpman, Melitz, and Rubinstein's (2008) extension of Anderson and van Wincoop's framework, which allows...