The abolishment of passport and any other type of border controls at the German-Polish and German-Czech border in December 2007 provoked public concerns that open border would increase cross-border crime. Despite these widespread concerns, there is still little research on whether the public...

This paper examines data on trade flows between West German Bundeslander (federal states) and East Germany to explore the effect of national borders on trade. Although the data covers only a small fraction of intra-German trade flows, I find a home bias of about factor 2.2; West German shipments...