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...

Personal characteristics of migrants could help to strengthen the impact of migrant networks on bilateral trade. While most of the attention has been focused on immigrants' educational attainment, this paper focuses on the relevance of the tasks carried out by migrants. Our empirical results...

This volume was prepared by Inga Heiland while she was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in July 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It comprises five chapters addressing one or more aspects of international trade and...

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has become an important importer for many countries. This paper investigates how turbulence in the PRC can spill over to trading partners through the trade channel. Exports from several East Asian and Southeast Asian countries to the PRC exceed 10% of their...

The theoretical claim that ethnic networks encourage trade has found broad empirical support in the literature on migration, business networks and international trade. Ethnic networks matter for the exporting firm, as they exhibit the potential to lower fixed and variable cost of exporting. This...

Was the collapse of world trade between 1928 and 1937 caused by higher transport costs, increased protectionism or the collapse of the gold standard? Using recent advances in the estimation of gravity equations, I examine the partial and general equilibrium effects of bilateral distance,...

Over the last 20 years the trade literature repeatedly documented the trade-reducing effects of inter- and intra-national borders. Thereby, the puzzling size and persistence of observed border effects from the beginning raised doubts on the role of underlying political borders. However, when...

This paper identifies a "border" effect in the absence of a border. The finding that trade between East- and West-Japan is 23.1 to 51.3 percent lower than trade within both country parts, is established despite the absence of an obvious east-west division due to historical borders, cultural...

I develop a theory of risk diversification through geography. In a general equilibrium trade model with monopolistic competition, characterized by stochastic demand, risk-averse entrepreneurs exploit the spatial correlation of demand across countries to lower the variance of their global sales....

The study aims to analyze the border effects on intra-African trade through the use of a gravity specification based on the monopolistic competition model of trade introduced by Krugman (1980). The study used CEPII data on trade flows between African countries over the period 1980-2006. We...