Gravity Equations are broadly used to estimate the impacts of trade impediments on trade flows. It is often stated that results are implausibly high. In theoretical foundations of the gravity equation, trade costs usually enter as "icebergmelting-costs." This paper offers an alternative approach...

This paper on Trade Agreements within SSA, is an assessment of the ex post bilateral trade effect of the European Union-African Caribbean Pacific Preferential Trade Agreement (EU-ACP PTA) and sub-regional regional trade agreements (RTAs) on bilateral trade involving SSA countries. The main...

Following closely the analytical approach adopted by Head and Mayer (2004) and Novy (2010), this paper derives a micro-founded bilateral trade cost measure for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a function of observable domestic and inter-national trade data. The derived measure of trade cost by Novy...

This study provides a decomposition of the WTO Global Trade Costs Index into five policy-relevant components: transport and travel costs; information and transaction costs; ICT connectedness; trade policy and regulatorydifferences; and governance quality. The WTO Global Trade CostsIndex is based...

To estimate correctly the effect of variable trade costs on firms’ exports, the gravity equation should control for the number of firms that participate in foreign markets. Due to the absence of these data, previous studies control for this omitted variable using econometric strategies that...

This paper assesses whether the sensitivity of bilateral trade volumes to various trade cost factors is constant or varies across countries. It utilizes a random coeffcients model and analyses a cross-sectional sample of bilateral trade data for 96 countries in 2005. We expect the elasticity of...

Goods trade and international mobility of labor are typically analyzed separately. While there is excellent research in both fields, far less is known about the interrelationships between international migration and international trade. This paper provides a first structurally estimable model of...

Many studies have found that international borders represent large barriers to trade. But how do international borders compare to domestic border barriers? We investigate international and domestic border barriers in a unified framework. We consider a unique data set of exports from individual...