We propose and apply methods to quantify the impact of national institutions on international trade and development. We are able to identify the direct impact of country-specific institutions on international trade within the structural gravity framework. Our approach naturally addresses the...

This paper studies the intangible costs of international trade by extending the basic gravity equation with measures of cultural and institutional distance, and institutional quality. Analyzing a sample of bilateral trade flows between 92 countries in 1999, we find that institutional distance...

We move beyond the nation-state as the unit of analysis and use subnational spatial variation to study the effect of the institutional environment on international trade. Additionally, we address the heterogeneous effect of trade agreements on different regions within a country. Employing a...

This thesis explores the role of different measures of proximity on some topics related to international trade. We focus on how institutional setting (institutional proximity) and network structure (cognitive and social proximity) influence the geography of international trade. In the first...