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 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,...

The empirical evidence that institutional differences across countries affect bilateral trade is robust. The crucial question remains how countries can enhance trade amid these differences. In this paper, we measure the degree to which governance and institutions differ between countries as...

Adopting a gravity framework and using data from 2010 to 2012 for 74 countries, we investigate whether the intensity of GlobalGAP standard adoption has a positive impact on EU banana import values. Intensity is measured by using number of GlobalGAP certified producers and hectares harvested...

We examine the impact of two important non-tariff measures presumed to simultaneously affect firms' decisions to export to the European Union (EU). As a novelty to the literature, we analyse the impacts of EU pesticide standards on African exports alongside a complementary non-tariff measure in...

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...