In this paper I investigate the impact of a decrease in trade costs on firms' decisions to export. The main contribution of this paper is to evaluate empirically the theoretical predictions of several models of multi-product exporters. The focus is on the firm export entry decision and the...

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...

We examine transaction-level Peruvian import data to show that firms are subject to significant costs of port-of-entry delays. At the transaction level, we observe the time it takes a shipment to clear each step in the entry process. Our theory shows conditions under which observed entry times...

BACI draws on United Nations COMTRADE data and covers more than 200 countries and 5,000 products, between 1994 and 2004. Imports and exports flows are reported annually by 130 countries to United Nations in values and quantities. When both exporting and importing countries report, we have two...

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...

This paper documents the construction of BACI, our international trade database, which covers more than 200 countries and 5,000 products, between 1994 and 2007. New approaches have been developed to reconcile data reported by almost 150 countries to the United Nations Statistics Division,...

In this paper we investigate the impact of a decrease in trade costs on firm decisions to export. The main contribution of this paper is to evaluate empirically the theoretical predictions of several models of multi-product exporters. The focus is on the firm export entry decision and the within...

The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries whose joint gross domestic products (GDPs) account for 36 percent of world GDP and whose mutual trade accounts for approximately 24 percent of world trade. As for most proposed free trade...

For more than forty years, the gravity equation has been a workhorse for cross-country empirical analyses of international trade flows and, in particular, the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. However, the gravity equation is subject to the same econometric critique as...

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,...