This paper assesses whether a bilateral FTA exerts a positive growth effect of the economies of the two countries engaging in the FTA. It employs a nonparametric matching approach, which is more faithful to questions posed by trade theories, imposes no specific functional froms on the relation,...

This paper assesses whether a bilateral FTA raises the growth rates of the two countries engaging in the FTA. A nonparametric matching approach, which imposes no specific functional forms and can be applied to a broad range of data structures, is employed to estimate the FTA effect on the...