Recently gravity trade models are applied to disaggregated trade data. Here many zeros are characteristic. In the presence of excess zeros usual Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) is still consistent, the variance covariance matrix however is invalid. Correct economic interpretation...

Singapore?s outward FDI is peculiar in important respects, even though it shares some characteristics with FDI undertaken by traditional investor countries. The focus of FDI in the manufacturing sector on lower-income Asian host countries suggests that the motivations and trade repercussions of...

The deepening of the Barcelona Agreement and the discussions of the creation of a Mediterranean Union has awakened the interest of the non-EU Mediterranean countries to expand their exports to the European markets. This study analyses the factors that influence the German imports of olive oil by...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

Der Beitrag stellt die Außenhandelsbeziehungen zwischen den 15 alten und den acht neuen mittel- und osteuropäischen Mitgliedern der Europäischen Union in den Mittelpunkt. Werden sie durch die EU-Osterweiterung zusätzliche Impulse erhalten? Diese Frage wird im Folgenden mit Hilfe des...

Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....