This paper studies the role of reduced barriers to international trade from two dimensions: (i) the implementation of Free Trade Agreements and (ii) declining "border effects". Our empirical estimates suggest that diminished border effects accounts for the bulk of the increase in international...

We propose and apply methods to quantify the impact of national institutions on international trade and development. We are able to identify the direct impact of country-specific institutions on international trade within the structural gravity framework. Our approach naturally addresses the...

International trade in manufacturing goods has risen strongly over the past decades, contributing to the expansion of global value chains (GVCs). This paper studies how two factors contributed to this rise since 1970: (i) declining "border effects" that are arguably related to the ICT revolution...

The practice of trade cost measurement faces several challenges related to data quality, methodology and theory; but the major issue is that of data scarcity. Due to these facts both domestic and asymmetric trade costs have been ignored despite being a feature of modern trade models. This paper...

In this paper, I estimate the impact of heterogeneity in non-tariff-measures (NTMs) policies on countries' global value chains (GVCs)-related trade and its backward and forward components. I firstly build a regulatory distance (RD) index, which measures the degree of dissimilarity in NTMs...

Modern theoretical and empirical analyses in international trade typically focus on firms as the sole trading actors. This is consistent with the fact that firms have traditionally accounted for the vast majority of trade and, hence, examining their behavior allows for fully characterizing trade...

We quantify the economic impact of a potential secession of Catalonia from Spain. Using a novel dataset of trade flows between 17 Spanish sub-national regions and 142 countries, we estimate effects of different levels of borders on trade flows and uncover heterogeneity in country-to-country,...

We nest an extended two-way fixed effect (ETWFE) estimator for staggered difference-in-differences within the structural gravity model. To test the ETWFE, we estimate the effects of regional trade agreements (RTAs). The results suggest that RTA estimates in the current gravity literature may be...

We nest an extended two-way fixed effect (ETWFE) estimator for staggered difference-in-differences within the structural gravity model. To test the ETWFE, we estimate the effects of regional trade agreements (RTAs). The results suggest that RTA estimates in the current gravity literature may be...

The Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) was established to promote the exports of low-income countries to industrialized countries in order to support their economic growth and development. However, the design of these schemes is rather complex and the effects of GSP have been found to be...