As the multilateral trade negotiations launched at Qatar in 2001 reeled from one collapse to another before stalling with no obvious end in sight in 2008, economies seeking new commercial opportunities turned en masse to the pursuit of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs). Indeed...

Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...

Despite widespread anecdotal evidence that lower trade barriers increase international trade, there is little firm quantitative evidence of the ‘trade-cost elasticity’ of trade flows, one of the two key aggregate statistics that have recently been identified as sufficient to quantify the...