This paper claims that distance alone is a poor proxy for international transport costs in gravity equations. We develop a theoretical framework with a manufacturing and a transport sector, where the level of manufacturing exports determines the demand for transport. Above a certain threshold,...

The distance puzzle has been wildly discussed in the literature since Leamer and Levinsohn (1995) shed the light on it. This puzzle simply says that "the world is not getting smaller": distance still matters to account for trade. This is reflected in a decreasing distance of trade (DOT), or in a...

This article describes the development of international trade blocs world wide from the 1950s till 2010. We updated the data on international trade flows and introduced a new trade bloc variable based on the intramax hierarchical clustering technique, which defines trade blocs on actual trade...

I investigate the effect of changing language skills on trade using an unique panel data set on spoken language. It tracks over thirty, mostly European, countries from the mid-90s to the beginning of the 2010s. In this period, European countries have witnessed an advancing trade integration and...

The relationship between geography and trade is a central topic in international economics. This paper investigates the potential existence of a continental bias in world trade flows on a sample of 182 countries over the period 1990-2006. Using traditional estimation techniques and recent...

The Gravity Model is the workhorse for empirical studies in International Economies and it is commonly used in explaining the trade flow between countries. Recently, several studies have showed the importance of taking into account the spatial effect. Spatial Econometric techniques meet this...