I present a new stylized fact from a large sample of countries for the period 2000-2006: bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI) flows are almost never observed in the absence of bilateral trade flows. I document a similar pattern using bilateral foreign affiliate sales (FAS), aggregating them...

The WTO dispute resolution system is widely used and is a litigation-oriented process. It is at the core of global trade relations today. Both the United States and China have been aggressive users of it. Each country has shown a willingness to address contentious issues. This has been to the...

There is an emerging consensus among American politicians and many citizens that trade and globalization have undermined America's working class, resulting in a rise in U.S. populism. This view frequently targets the 2000 U.S. law that granted China “permanent normal trade relations” (PNTR)...

We use a new firm level data set that establishes the location, ownership, and activity of 650,000 multinational subsidiaries - close to a comprehensive picture of global multinational activity. A number of patterns emerge from the data. Most foreign direct investment (FDI) occurs between rich...

This study analyzes the impact of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) on the investment of multinational firms located outside the FTA-covered regions. Specifically, we analyze how Japanese firms located in the European Union (EU) changed their investment behavior in response to the EU-Korea...

Global Value Chains are a dominant feature of today's global economy, yet their analysis is still incipient from an empirical perspective. Building on a recent OECD-WTO database and the results of an on-going research at WTO, the present essay contributes at filling this gap. The effective...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, against the background of an existing empirical literature on the duration of trade which has found that international trade is often of strikingly short duration, we aim to establish whether or not EU imports from the rest of the world also are...

Aiming to explore how the survival of trade flows has evolved over time, we analyze a rich data set of detailed imports to individual EU15 countries from 140 non-EU exporters, covering the period 1962-2006. We find that short duration is a persistent characteristic of trade throughout the...

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is inappropriate to analyze the duration of trade with continuous-time models such as the Cox...

The volume and commodity structure of EU trade with the transition countries in central and eastern Europe (CEECs) is estimated on the assumption that it will follow the pattern of trade among market economies. A gravity-type approach at the level of product groups is used, combining geography...