Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...

This paper examines the relative magnitude of trade-creating and trade-diverting effects of some important RTAs using a panel dataset consisting of observations for every five years beginning in 1950 and ending in 1999, taken from Andrew Rose's gravity model (2004) database. The result of the...