How do trade costs affect international trade? This paper offers a new approach. We rely on a flexible gravity equation that predicts variable trade cost elasticities, both across and within country pairs. We apply this framework to the effect of currency unions on international trade. While we...

Objective: The objective of the article is to determine which exchange rate regime provides higher bilateral trade: fixed rate or currency union. Research Design & Methods: An index was designed based on variables commonly recognised as those that might affect the value of bilateral trade and...

This paper illustrates how the work of the WTO's standing committees is fuelling regulatory cooperation between WTO members, and inspiring RTA negotiators. We explore, as a case study, how the WTO TBT Committee has shaped provisions on international standards in RTAs, and focus on the extent to...

For the estimation of structural gravity models using PPML with countrypair, exportertime and importer-time effects it proves useful to exploit the equilibrium restrictions imposed by the system of multilateral resistances. This yields an iterative projection based PPML estimator that is...

We develop a novel two-stage methodology that allows us to study the empirical determinants of the ex post effects of past free trade agreements (FTAs) as well as obtain ex ante predictions for the effects of future FTAs. We first identify 908 unique estimates of the effects of FTAs on different...