Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, independent entrepreneurial migrants from China have been increasingly flocking to Africa in search of greener pastures. This paper scrutinizes the empirical foundations of the increasingly hostile discourses of African traders regarding the...

Previous empirical research has assumed that goods trade responds to goods trade preferentialism only, while other forms of preferentialism – such as services trade or investment preferentialism – are irrelevant for goods trade. This paper provides novel evidence for the gains from a broader...

A huge body of empirical and theoretical literature has emerged on the relationship between exchange rate uncertainty and international trade. In empirical studies the estimated impacts of exchange rate uncertainty on trade figures are at most weak and often ambiguous with respect to their...

The nature of international trade has changed significantly. For centuries, trade concentrated on the exchange of finished goods. It now increasingly involves bits of value that are added at different locations to combine into one final product. Therefore, trade in functions or tasks are of...

The current globalisation process is characterized by the emergence of global value chains. That is, production processes are becoming increasingly geographically fragmented. Not only are final goods traded internationally, but in particular, trade in intermediate goods and services has...

The nature of international trade has changed significantly. For centuries, trade concentrated on the exchange of finished goods. It now increasingly involves bits of value that are added at different locations to combine into one final product. Therefore, trade in functions or tasks are of...

Immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variations across US states for the period 1970 to 2005, we quantify the impact of immigrants on intermediate goods...

Are product standards protectionism in disguise? This paper estimates the costs of non- compliance with U.S. product standards, using a new database on U.S. import refusals from 2002 to 2012. We find that import refusals significantly decrease exports to the United States. This trade reducing...

We provide novel evidence on the micro-structure of international trade during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global recession exploring a rich firm-level data set from Spain. The analysis is motivated by the surprisingly strong export performance of Spain in the aftermath of the great...

This paper investigates the relation between firms' productivity and exporting behavior in presence of export intermediaries. Using a cross section of firm-level data for several advanced and developing economies, the study confirms the productivity-sorting prediction according to which domestic...