Cultural proximity increases bilateral trade flows through a trade-cost and a bilateral-affinity (preferences) channel. Conventional measures of cultural proximity, such as common language, common religion, etc., do not allow to separately quantify those channels empirically. We argue that...

The distance puzzle has been wildly discussed in the literature since Leamer and Levinsohn (1995) shed the light on it. This puzzle simply says that "the world is not getting smaller": distance still matters to account for trade. This is reflected in a decreasing distance of trade (DOT), or in a...

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...

Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...

The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries whose joint gross domestic products (GDPs) account for 36 percent of world GDP and whose mutual trade accounts for approximately 24 percent of world trade. As for most proposed free trade...

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...

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...

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...

This paper derives the gravity equation with intermediate goods trade. We extend a standard monopolistic competition model to incorporate intermediate goods trade, and show that the gravity equation with intermediates trade is identical to the one without it except in that gross output should be...

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...