Since Rose’s (2004) striking finding of negligible WTO trade effects, numerous studies have at- tempted to solve the so-called WTO puzzle. These studies adopt novel model specifications to control for potential sources of bias, but often lead to conflicting results. Multilateral...

This paper proposes a within estimator for three-level data, such as time-variant bilateral trade flows. The estimator helps to address the computational difficulties in estimating, for instance, the gravity model of bilateral trade that needs to control for unobserved country-pair and...

Despite recent theoretical literature highlighting the cross effects between preferential trade agreements (PTAs), like the domino effect and the competitive liberalization theory, little has been done to quantify their impact on bilateral trade flows. This paper investigates how preexisting...

This paper empirically examines whether and how similarity in country characteristics affects the changes in trade flows amongst member countries under a preferential trade agreement (PTA). It demonstrates that accounting for similarity in size, income and loca- tion of member countries is...

Conventional estimate of the trade diversion (TD) effect of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) tends to be much smaller than that of the trade creation (TC) effect. This paper ex- amines two sources of estimation bias of the TD effect. The first bias of TD arises from the difficulty in...

The empirical trade literature has long been puzzled by the finding of a large and non-decreasing distance coefficient in the gravity equation amid falling transportation costs over time. To shed new light on this puzzle, the recent theoretical literature shifts its focus to the differential...

This paper studies social choice correspondences assigning a set of choices to each pair consisting of a nonempty subset of the set of alternatives and a weak preference profile, which is called an extended social choice correspondence (ESCC). The ESCC satisfies unanimity if, when there is a...

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between firm size and production efficiency, and the relationship between firm size and the likelihood of paying bribes using firm-level data from Vietnam. Our analysis indicates that middle-sized firms’ production efficiencies tend to...

In Man and Takayama (2013) (henceforth MT) we show that many classical impossibility theorems follow from three simple and intuitive axioms on the social choice correspondence when the set of social alternatives is finite. This note extends the main theorem (Theorem 1) in MT to the case where...

This paper proposes a two-party spatial model of policy and valence issues for office-seeking candidates who face a two-stage electoral process with strategic voters. We study how the difference in valences among candidates affects the equilibrium outcomes when voters are strategic and...