Barriers to international trade are known to be large but due to data limitations it is hard to measure them directly for a large number of countries over many years. To address this problem I derive a micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs that indirectly infers trade frictions from...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...

"We use a new measure of total trade costs at the bilateral country level to examine the change in international trade integration between 1870 and 1913. Trade costs are lowest amongst the most developed countries and highest in the peripheral and poor countries. On average, our measure declined...