Trade restrictions impact factor and commodity prices in very predictable ways according to international trade theory. We use a new data set to explore the direct effect on the price of slaves that resulted from legislation prohibiting the importation of slaves after January 1, 1808....

Gravity model explanations of trade volumes frequently include dummy variables to account for the commonality of language among trading partners. In this paper we use a data set for the number of people in a country who speak English as a first language or English as a second language (Crystal,...

We introduce a measure of language difficulty called "linguistic distance" into a modified gravity model to determine whether the fact that a language is further away from English affects the level of trade. Our sample of 36 non-English speaking countries includes Japan and South Korea, which we...