As, in Europe, many institutional reforms have been undertaken to establish an economic union, it can be expected that the relevance of borders has decreased over time. For the EU 15, we investigate the expected integration process of the market for corporate control - an illustrative market for...

This paper studies the nature of spillover effects in bank lending flows from advanced to the emerging market economies and identifies specific channels through which such effects occur. Based on a gravity model we examine a panel data set on cross-border bank flows from 17 advanced to 28...

A basic assumption of the gravity equation of international trade is that increasing trade costs lower exports. Butintuition and theory imply that a high export volume lowers bilateral trade costs as well, because a fixed cost intensivetrade sector probably bears lower average costs with more...

For decades, nontariff trade barriers (NTBs) have been regarded as more problematic policy instruments than tariffs in international trade negotiations. This is due to the fact that trade impacts of nontariff trade barriers are less transparent than those of tariffs. Tariffication of nontariff...

Gravity equations explaining foreign affiliates' sales are ad hoc and hence, estimated coeffcients are hard to interpret. We therefore provide the theoretical underpinnings of the gravity equation applied to the analysis of sales of foreign affiliates of multinational firms. We argue that the...

Cultural proximity increases bilateral trade flows through a trade-cost and a bilateral-affinity (preferences) channel. Conventional measures of cultural proximity, such as common language, common religion, etc., do not allow to separately quantify those channels empirically. We argue that...

Der Dienstleistungssektor hat in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten erheblich an Bedeutung gewonnen. Wo ist Deutschland im internationalen Dienstleistungshandel einzuordnen? Welche Faktoren bestimmen das Muster des internationalen Dienstleistungshandels? Wer kann von einer Öffnung der...

The 2003 reforms of the Common Agricultural policy of the European Union introduced decoupled income transfers as the most prominent policy instrument. However, member states were given substantial discretion over the degree and timing of the reform implementation. As a result, different...

We analyze the spatial interaction among regions in North America and in Western Europe. We use a gravity model extended by a spatial correlation structures where data allows to evaluate the level of impact and the length of the spatial tail. This allows us to address to effects external to the...

This paper studies the spread of the Black Death as a proxy for the ow of medieval trade between 1346 and 1351. The Black Death struck most areas of Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Based on a modified version of the gravity model, we estimate the speed (in kilometers per day) of transmission...