This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

Goods trade and international mobility of labor are typically analyzed separately. While there is excellent research in both fields, far less is known about the interrelationships between international migration and international trade. This paper provides a first structurally estimable model of...

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....

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...

Was the collapse of world trade between 1928 and 1937 caused by higher transport costs, increased protectionism or the collapse of the gold standard? Using recent advances in the estimation of gravity equations, I examine the partial and general equilibrium effects of bilateral distance,...

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 carry out an indirect inference test of two versions of a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of world trade. One of these, the ‘classical’ model,is well-known as the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model of world trade, in which countries trade homogeneous products in world markets and...

We review a recent body of theoretical work that aims to put numbers on the consequences of globalization. A unifying theme of our survey is methodological. We rely on gravity models and demonstrate how they can be used for counterfactual analysis. We highlight how various economic...

The practice of trade cost measurement faces several challenges related to data quality, methodology and theory; but the major issue is that of data scarcity. Due to these facts both domestic and asymmetric trade costs have been ignored despite being a feature of modern trade models. This paper...

We examine the evolution of market potential and its role in driving economic growth over the long twentieth century. Theoretically, we exploit a structural gravity model to derive a closed-form solution for a widely-used measure of market potential. We are thus able to express market potential...