The United States championed the creation of new rules for the digital economy in TPP. Analyzing this effort as “digital megaregulation” foregrounds aspects that the conventional “digital trade” framing tends to conceal. On both accounts, TPP’s most consequential rules for the digital...

This paper addresses the regulatory and policy environments conducive for e-commerce to thrive. In particular, as regulatory issues affecting e-commerce have become more prominent in recent regional trade agreements (RTAs), the paper seeks to investigate their role in setting the regulatory...

Anthropological evidence suggests that the human species has evolved what could be called a "trading instinct" over millions of years of Darwinian adaptation, where trade acts as a social catalyst and thus as a suppressor of violent conflict among trading groups. Yet, the geographical and...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of nominal exchange rate movements on cross-border travel by consumers and on retail firms' sales. We develop a search-theoretic model of price-setting heterogeneous retailers and traveling consumers who face nominal...

Within-state variation in the search frequency for “amazon” at Google is used to measure the industry specific impact of e-commerce on retail employment. To instrument for exogenous variation in e-commerce exposure, I rely on random variation in consumer's use of the Internet for tasks like...

The New Trade Theory predicts that international trade lowers prices for consumers and expands the choices available to them. This study shows that both predictions may no longer hold once adjustments in the retail sector are taken into account. I present a new model of retailing in general...

We use a newly developed indicator of production sharing and processing trade to investigate the determinants of such trade in the context of a gravity model. The Network Trade Index measures countries' interdependence through the extent of trade in parts and components for further processing...

Vertical gravity deploys as the dependent variable a newly developed indicator of production sharing and processing trade among country pairs. The intensity of this relationship among 73 countries between 1998 and 2005 is assessed in a standard fixed-effects panel setting, with particular focus...