Diese Dissertation beschreibt Marktverzerrungen auf mehreren Ebenen, die entweder aufgrund von Fehlfunktionen oder durch Interventionen politischer Art entstehen. Die Fehlfunktionen schließen einerseits Märkte mit imperfektem Wettbewerb, und andererseits Versagen auf anderweitig vollkommenen...

Die ersten drei Artikel (Kapitel 3, 4 und 5) analysieren unter welchen Bedingungen positive oder negative Auswirkungen von Standards auf Handel überwiegen. Wir betrachten die folgenden Determinanten: Marktkonzentration, Produktkomplexität, Qualität öffentlicher Institutionen und die Art des...

The 2003 reforms of the Common Agricultural policy of the European Union introduced decoupled income transfers as the most prominent policy instrument. However, member states were given substantial discretion over the degree and timing of the reform implementation. As a result, different...

With the extension of the standard Melitz Model from Ahn et al. [2011], the important role of intermediaries in facilitating trade is now recognized. In this paper, we are going to expand Chaney's [2008] approach to an Intermediate Melitz Model. By researching if Chaney's results still apply for...

There has been an extensive discussion on the applicability of Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) to trade. Here, we are going to analyse again the performance of PPML but in the light of a bimodal distribution; in addition, we also explicitly account for excess zeros. Simulations are...

French (2011) can analytically show that the standard Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) gravity trade model is only correctly specified for disaggregate data; gravity trade model analysis should be done at product level and then estimation results should be reaggregated. If however gravity trade...

The issues of zero trade observations and the validity of the log linear transformation of the gravity equation have generated a number of debates in the literature with differing claims about the most suitable estimation technique. To produce unbiased and consistent estimates for policy making,...

GlobalGAP is an important private standard in the food sector. Our work consists of two essays. First essay investigates into geographic diffusion of GlobalGAP. We use a panel from 2008 to 2012 for 170 FAO member countries to analyze GlobalGAP diffusion in the agricultural sector as a whole as...

Recently, discussion about the appropriate estimation of gravity trade models has started in agriculture. Here, we are going to review recent developments in the literature. It appears that fixed effects Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood is not only the only consistent estimator [Santos Silva...

With the extension of the standard Melitz Model from Ahn et al. [2011], the important role of intermediaries in facilitating trade is now recognized. In this paper, we are going to expand Chaney's [2008] approach to an Intermediate Melitz Model. By researching if Chaney's results still apply for...