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...

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...

In previous research, we analysed the effect of technological innovation, understood as absorptive capacity, on exports by using a gravity model of trade for the year 2000 (see Márquez-Ramos and Martínez-Zarzoso, 2009). We found that the effect of technological innovation on trade varies...

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...

The present paper studies the modelling of inter-regional trade flows in the newly developed general equilibrium model of European Commission, Rhomolo. In contrast to international trade, usually, trade of goods and services between regions is not recorded statistically. As a result, no...

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...

This paper presents a simple two country model in which firms in manufacturing sector choose a technology level (high or low). I show how trade integration and productivity differential affect technology choice clearly. In particular, if the gap of productivity of high technology is medium,...

We use firm-level data for 15 countries and 13 manufacturing sectors to estimate firm-level productivity parameters and to establish representative country-sector-specific empirical productivity distributions. We use these distributions against the backdrop of multi-sector versions of the models...

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...

We investigate how protectionist policies influence short-run economic growth. Our empirical strategy exploits an extraordinary tax scandal that gave rise to an unexpected change of government in Sweden. A free-trade majority in parliament was overturned by a protectionist majority in 1887. We...