Why are trade agreements regional? I address this question in a model of oligopoly featuring product variety. Tariffs have the effect of manipulating a country's terms of trade and shifting profits towards the domestic market at the expense of foreign trade partners. Countries endogenously form...

We develop a theory of economic disintegration that features both endogenously formed tax and trade policies. We show very generally that the economic disintegration of a country from an economic union leads to a deeper integration of international trade institutions. Moreover, we set up a...

This study considers endogenous determination of domestic standards on products that cause negative consumption externalities in the presence of a preferential trade agreement (PTA) in a three-country world. In particular, we examine how a PTA affects the optimal levels of external tariffs and...

The number of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements has surged in recent years. In order to benefit from preferential tariff rates,firms must apply and comply with rules of origin requirements. This is costly and explains why preference utilization rates (PUR) are far below 100 percent. In...

The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), launched in 2004, is a unified European Union (EU) policy framework towards the EU neighboring (ENP) countries. The objective of the ENP is to strengthen the prosperity, stability and security of the (enlarged) EU countries and the ENP countries. Even...

During the last century there has been a huge reduction in trade costs at almost every spatial scale impulsed not only by technological advances applied to transport and communication systems, but also by the spread of regional trade agreements and other related schemes. This estringent fall has...

This paper sets up a model of trade, in which two countries with differing levels of technology specialize on the production of subsets of the global value chain. In the open economy equilibrium, the technologically backward country exports intermediates in exchange for imports of a homogeneous...

We study the multifaceted effects and persistence of trade policy shocks on financial markets in a structural vector autoregression. The model is identified via event day heteroskedasticity. We find that restrictive US trade policy shocks affect US and international stock prices heterogeneously,...