Most FDI takes place between the developed countries, which suggests that the market-seeking motive is important for understanding FDI. However, given the stylized fact that trade barriers (e.g. transportation costs and financial barriers) have declined over the past 20 years, models that aim to...

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...

This paper documents the novel fact that Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) decrease bilateral trade imbalances as measured by conventional measure of the net export share in gross trade. While on average an RTA decreases bilateral trade imbalance by 7%, greater trade integration through a deeper...

In the analysis of bilateral trade flows, reported trade of zero or missing observations are quite common and this is a problem when estimating log-linear gravity equations. This has caused many researchers to either ignore the zero trade flows or to replace the zero with a small positive...

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....

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....

Although economists have long been aware of Jensen's inequality, many econometric applications have neglected an important implication of it: estimating economic relationships in logarithms can lead to significant biases in the presence of heteroskedasticity. This paper explains why this problem...

What is the effect of nominal exchange rate variability on trade? I argue that the methods conventionally used to answer this perennial question are plagued by a variety of sources of systematic bias. I propose a novel approach that simultaneously addresses all of these biases, and present new...

There are countries that do not fall under the prevailing definitions of developed and developing country that are employed by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO fails to take into account the special circumstances and needs of these countries. While such special circumstances and needs...

Although economists have long been aware of Jensen's inequality, many econometric applications have neglected an important implication of it: the standard practice of interpreting the parameters of log-linearized models estimated by ordinary least squares as elasticities can be highly misleading...