Linguistic distance, i.e. the dissimilarity between languages, is an important factor influencing international economic transactions such as migration or international trade flows by imposing hurdles for second language acquisition and increasing transaction costs. To measure these costs, we...

We review and interpret the main theoretical developments in the gravity literature from its very early, a-theoretical applications to the latest structural contributions. We also discuss challenges and implement methods to estimate empirical gravity equations. We finish with a presentation and...

Although globalization has diminished the importance of distance, empirical gravity models find little change in distance coefficients. We argue that changing distance costs are largely reflected in the constant term. A proportional fall in distance costs is consistent with constant distance...