Starting with Tinbergen (1962), quantifying the effects of regional trade agreements (RTAs) on international trade flows has always been among the most popular topics in the trade literature. Also not surprisingly, to estimate the effects of RTAs, most researchers and policy analysts have relied...

Using a novel common econometric specification, we examine the measurement of three important effects in international trade that historically have been addressed largely separately: the (partial) effects on trade of economic integration agreements, national borders, and bilateral distance....

We quantify the relationships between deep trade liberalization and foreign direct investment (FDI). To this end, we focus on the effects of Deep Trade Agreements (DTAs), and we rely on a structural framework that simultaneously enables us to (i) estimate the direct impact of DTAs on FDI, (ii)...

The principle of reciprocity is central to trade cooperation. Economic theory characterizes reciprocal policy changes that guide nations from noncooperative policies to the Pareto efficiency frontier. This paper extends the theory of reciprocity to a wide range of settings relevant for 21st...

This paper considers trade agreements in a sufficiently general framework to encompass both imperfectly competitive market structures and income effects in government objectives. We show that governments choose globally efficient policies if they act as if they do not value the impact of their...

Much potential for trade liberalization exists in industries and markets with trade barriers that are prohibitive for all or many firms. In standard political economic theories of trade policy, observed prohibitive barriers must be globally optimal according to static government preferences,...

While traditional empirical models using determinants like size and trade costs are able to predict RTA formation reasonably well, we demonstrate that allowing for machine detected non-linear patterns helps to improve the predictive power of RTA formation substantially. We employ machine...

This paper analyses the effect of international borders and of trade agreements at international borders on subnational (i.e. regional) growth. We construct an extensive panel dataset covering 1,350 regions in 86 countries worldwide between 1950 and 2017. Our results show that international...