This paper identifies the most restrictive limit that rules of origin can enforce and still continue to guarantee gains from trade for free trade area formation in general settings. Many commonly used rules of origin exceed this condition in practice. Second, free trade areas generally involve...

This paper shows how gains from trade are conditioned by love of variety, defined as the extent to which an additional product variety generates benefits in either final or intermediate consumption. We develop a multi-country, multi-sector gravity trade model where love of variety is...

We review a recent body of theoretical work that aims to put numbers on the consequences of globalization. A unifying theme of our survey is methodological. We rely on gravity models and demonstrate how they can be used for counterfactual analysis. We highlight how various economic...

Modern trade models attribute the dispersion of international prices to physical and man-made barriers to trade, to the pricing-to-market by heterogeneous producers, and to differences in the quality of output offered by firms. This paper analyzes a quantitative general equilibrium model that...

In March 2018, representatives of member countries of the African Union signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement. This agreement provides a framework for trade liberalization in goods and services and is expected to eventually cover all African countries. Using a...

This paper takes a welfare-view on eastern enlargement of the EU, focusing on incumbent countries. Enlargement is decomposed into three elements: Single-market integration on commodity markets, budgetary costs from EU-expenditure policies, and singlemarket-induced migration from new to present...

We use detailed data on exporters from Costa Rica, Ecuador and Uruguay as well as on their buyers to show that: aggregate exports are disproportionally driven by few multi-buyers exporters; and each multi-buyer exporter's foreign sales of any product are in turn accounted for by few dominant...

This paper quantifies the effect of the government-controlled appreciation of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) vis-à-vis the USD from 2005 to 2008 on the prices charged by US producers. As the RMB during that time was pegged to a basket of currencies, the empirical strategy must account for the fact...

This paper quantifies the effect of the government-controlled appreciation of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) vis-à-vis the USD from 2005 to 2008 on the prices charged by US producers. As the RMB during that time was pegged to a basket of currencies, the empirical strategy must account for the fact...