The impact of international trade, or “openness”, on economic growth is difficult to quantify because of reverse causality. In this paper, I use recent advances in gravity equation estima- tion to generate a geography-based instrument for openness a la Frankel and Romer (1999). In contrast...

This short note tries to argue that distance is not necessarily harmful for trade. It is shown that there may be an increase in the production and volume of trade if time zones of the trading nations are non-overlapping. This implies a positive effect of distance on the volume of trade. It is...