We develop a simple Hotelling spatial-trade model of price dispersion to examine how distance-related costs affect price dispersion, and we offer some insights on how such costs may best be inferred from price-dispersion measures. Our theoretical model suggests that measures of price dispersion...

We note that calibration parameters in a multi-country Armington trade model play a role similar to that of econometric residuals: they allow the model to fit the data exactly. We use this premise to evaluate the "fit" of a standard multi-country computable general-equilibrium model. We find...

This paper reconsiders the Canada-US border's effect on trade. We first test whether findings of McCallum (1995) and Helliwell (1995)--that the border substantially decreases trade--change when different, better, data are used. We find that the "border effect" may be substantially less than...

Many improvements have been proposed for the basic gravity model specification, most of which are confirmed by standard statistical tests due to the large number of observations often used to estimate such models. We use Monte Carlo experiments to examine situations in which features of models...

We note that calibration parameters in a multi-country Armington trade model play a role similar to that of econometric residuals: they allow the data to fit the model exactly. We use this premise to evaluate the 'fit' of a standard multi-country computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. We...