Trade costs are crucial in new economic geography (NEG) models. The unavailability of actual trade costs data requires the approximation of trade costs. Most NEG studies do not deal with the ramifications of the particular trade costs specification used. This paper shows that the specification...

In this paper, I explore the impact of per capita income and population size on markups and bilateral trade flows in a random search framework. The intuition is that, when a firm randomly meets a consumer, only that consumer's income matters to the firm's pricing strategy;the size of the...

This paper analyses the effect of international borders and of trade agreements at international borders on subnational (i.e. regional) growth. We construct an extensive panel dataset covering 1,350 regions in 86 countries worldwide between 1950 and 2017. Our results show that international...