The paper analyzes whether the political regime of a country influences its involvement in international trade. Firstly, we develop a theoretical model that predicts that autocracies trade less than democracies. Secondly, we test the predictions of the model empirically using a panel of more...

This paper on Trade Agreements within SSA, is an assessment of the ex post bilateral trade effect of the European Union-African Caribbean Pacific Preferential Trade Agreement (EU-ACP PTA) and sub-regional regional trade agreements (RTAs) on bilateral trade involving SSA countries. The main...

In a seminal paper, Rose (2004) found that the assumed positive impact of the WTO on international trade was questionable. This finding has been scrutinized and modified in subsequent research, using different datasets, econometric methods and separating the WTO from other forms of trade...

This paper is the first to estimate the effect of two international agreements (Rotterdam Convention, RC, and the Stockholm Convention, SC) in reducing trade in hazardous substances. We estimate the effects of ratification of these agreements on imports of the affected products putting emphasis...

Although the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention has been signed by dozens of countries, only some of them enforce the laws against foreign bribery. To estimate whether the enforcement deters exports, we use a microfounded gravity model of bilateral trade flows of 132 countries. Our results imply that...

The gravity model of trade is used to assess the economic consequences of new borders, which arose in the wake of break-ups of multinational federations in Eastern Europe. The intensity of trade relations among the constituent parts of Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union and the Baltics was very high...

This paper analyzes the effects of non-tariff measures on international trade, using a structural gravity model with 77 exporters, 63 importers, and all goods available in the 6-digit Harmonized System. Unlike most of the literature on the subject, we chose to estimate the effect of each measure...

We estimate the effect of RTAs on bilateral exports by means of a gravity model analyzing its sensitivity to different specifications and methods. RTAs generate a sizable positive effect. However, shifting to country-pair and time-varying fixed effects systematically reduces coefficients....

The gravity model of trade is utilized to assess the impact of disintegration on trade. The analysis is based on three recent disintegration episodes involving the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The results point to a very strong home bias around the time of disintegration,...

The paper analyzes whether the political regime of a country influences its involvement in international trade. Firstly, we develop a theoretical model that predicts that autocracies trade less than democracies. Secondly, we test the predictions of the model empirically using a panel of more...