Proper measurement and aggregation of trade costs is of paramount importance for sound academic and policy analysis of the determinants - particularly those of policy - of economic outcomes. The international trade profession has witnessed significant new developments, both on the theoretical...

In the early nineties Central and East European Countries (CEEC) took considerable liberalisation efforts which led to visible changes in CEEC trade. In the period under observation, from 1995 to 2016, these countries recorded high growth rates, which exceeded the performance of other regions,...

How strong are strategic complementarities in price setting across firms? In this paper, we provide a direct empirical estimate of firm price responses to changes in prices of their competitors. We develop a general framework and an empirical identification strategy to estimate the elasticities...

Policy-making institutions such as the European Commission, the ECB and the OECD often use unit labor costs as a measure of international competitiveness. The goal of this paper is to examine how well this measure is related to international export performance at the firm level. To this end, we...

We use data on wages and rents in different U.S. cities to assess the amenity effects on production and consumption of cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of city residents. We show that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born...

Bilateral trade balances often play an important role in the international trade policy debate. Academic economists understand that they are misleading indicators of competitiveness and of the gains from trade. However, they also recognize their political relevance, calling for accurate...

Using highly disaggregated transaction-level trade data, we document the importance of new firmlevel trade partner relationships and the addition of new products to existing relationships in driving long-run import flows. Moreover, we find that these margins are sensitive to movements in the...

This paper investigates the nature and pattern of export specialization in Lithuania. The aim of this paper is to estimate the nature and pattern of Lithuanian export specialization under existing conditions. Seeking to define the nature and pattern of export specialization, the basic methods of...

The goal of the paper is to decompose gross exports/imports to/from Germany for seven selected economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia for 2000 and 2014, to identify the role of German in absorbing, reflecting,...

This paper presents econometric estimates for the Brazilian aggregate imports over the period 1996-2010. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that uses the Brazilian quarterly national accounts with this goal in mind. Besides estimating a demand equation (canonical model), as it...