Mine-related transport infrastructure specializes in connecting mines to the coast, and not so much to neighboring countries. This is most clearly seen in developing countries, whose transport infrastructure was originally designed to facilitate the export of natural resources in colonial times....

I construct a trade model of empire, and use it to interpret some of the key patterns in the history of European imperialism. I begin from the observation that trade was a key source of wealth for the colonies, and trade restrictions a key tool of extraction for colonial powers. But the value of...

This paper provides micro-level evidence that drug advertising regulations and inspections in China are used by local governments to discriminate against firms from outside the province. Furthermore, the degree of discrimination varies across firms in that drug manufacturers which have closer...

Several studies have reported a large negative effect of national borders on the volume of trade. We provide new estimates of the border effect for continental Europe using road rather than great circle – or “as-crows-fly” – distance. Road distances for 48 180 European city pairs have...

We quantify the effects of the container revolution on a large panel of product level trade flows during 1962-1990. We exploit time and cross-sectional variation in countries’ first adoption of container facilities to construct a time-varying bilateral container technology variable and...

This paper investigates the effect of Internet technology on how firms access export markets - directly or via intermediaries. Empirical evidence suggests that technology diffusion is geographically localised, with spillover effects from neighbouring firms decaying quickly over short distances....

This paper, in terms of a three-sector mobile capital version of Harris-Todaro type general equilibrium model of rural-urban migration with agricultural dualism and a non-traded intermediate input, tries to theoretically explain why a developing country may experience a ‘jobless growth’...

This paper examines the impact of foreign and domestic acquisitions on firm-level financial risk in Italy and Spain over the period 2002-2010. Our results indicate that foreign acquisition leads to a significant and steady reduction in financial risk. In contrast, the domestic acquisition...

Recent models of international trade have identified product quality as an important determinant of bilateral trade flows. Yet relatively little is understood about the relationship between the characteristics of the export market and the quality of products. In this paper we examine this link...

This paper investigates the relationship between firm heterogeneity and a firm’s decision to export, using the annual survey of Thai manufacturing firms from 2001 to 2004. A significant contribution of this paper is that we are, for the first time, able to break down FDI by country of origin...