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...

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...

Bilateral trade balances often play an important role inthe international trade policy debate. Disturbingly, several studies argue that the gravity model of trade fails when confronted with bilateral trade balances data, dubbing this "The Mystery of the Excess Trade Balances". Capitalizing on...

This paper estimates the effects of the EU enlargements in the 2000s for trade in parts and components and trade in final goods separately. A gravity model is applied to disaggregated trade data over the period 1999 - 2009 for trade between EU and OECD countries. The estimation approach accounts...

This paper investigates whether the relatedness of populations across the world shapes international trade flows. Using data on common ancestry for 172 countries covering more than 99% of global trade, we document that country pairs with a larger ancestral distance are less likely to trade with...

We build a model of tacit collusion between firms that operate in multiple markets to study the effects of trade costs. A key feature of the model is that cartel discipline is endogenous. Thus, markets that appear segmented are strategically linked via the incentive compatibility constraint....