This paper studies linearized spatial structural gravity models of bilateral trade à la Behrens, Ertur and Koch (2012). We show that these models do in fact not require spatial econometric methods for estimation. This result follows from the nature of the specific spatial weights matrix, and...

We investigate the impact of the euro adoption on commercial transactions of EMU countries. We refer to the abundant gravity-model literature about the effect of Currency Unions on trade originated by Rose (2000). We adapt this kind of modelling to the specific case of the European Monetary...

When analyzing panel data using regression models, it is often reasonable to allow for time-varying covariate effects. We propose a novel approach to modelling timevarying coefficients in panel data regressions, which is based on penalized regression techniques. To illustrate the usefulness of...

Gravity type models are widely used in international economics. In these models the inclusion of time-fi0xed regressors like geographical or cultural distance, language and institutional (dummy) variables is often of vital importance e.g. to analyse the impact of trade costs on...

The positive association between trade openness and income has been debated over years due to serious estimation flaws prevailing in the cross-country empirical trade literature. The present paper contributes to this debate by re-examining the long-run relationship between trade openness and...

The positive association between trade openness and income has been debated over years due to serious estimation flaws prevailing in the cross-country empirical trade literature. The present paper contributes to this debate by re-examining the long-run relationship between trade openness and...

Scholars and policy makers believe that democracy will bring prosperity through integration into the global economy via increased international trade. This study tests two theories as to why democracies might trade more. First, political freedom may be correlated with economic freedom, thus...

In this paper, I explore the impact of per capita income and population size on markups and bilateral trade flows in a random search framework. The intuition is that, when a firm randomly meets a consumer, only that consumer's income matters to the firm's pricing strategy;the size of the...

We develop a multi-sector gravity model with heterogeneous workers to quantify the aggregate and group-level welfare effects of trade. The model generalizes the specific-factors intuition to a setting with labor reallocation, leads to a parsimonious formula for the group-level welfare effects...