Trade economists have for long considered gravity models to estimate unexhausted potentials for bilateral trade. Similar to the discrepancy between "normal" and "actual" bilateral trade, one may ask the question about the difference between "normal" and actual bilateral multinational activity....

We develop a novel two-stage methodology that allows us to study the empirical determinants of the ex post effects of past free trade agreements (FTAs) as well as obtain ex ante predictions for the effects of future FTAs. We first identify 908 unique estimates of the effects of FTAs on different...

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...

How do trade costs affect international trade? This paper offers a new approach. We rely on a flexible gravity equation that predicts variable trade cost elasticities, both across and within country pairs. We apply this framework to the effect of currency unions on international trade. While we...

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...

For the estimation of structural gravity models using PPML with countrypair, exportertime and importer-time effects it proves useful to exploit the equilibrium restrictions imposed by the system of multilateral resistances. This yields an iterative projection based PPML estimator that is...

This paper analyses currency options for six Pacific states - Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu - that issue their own currencies. Empirical estimates indicate that these states already stabilize their currencies against the US dollar because of their large and...

With a decrease in formal trade barriers, trade facilitation has come into prominence as a policy tool for promoting trade. In this paper, we use a gravity model to examine the relationship between bilateral trade flows and trade facilitation. We also estimate the gains in trade derived from...

This paper estimates econometrically the impact of NAFTA on US-Mexico and US-third countries (groups of countries) trade flows. Using a traditional gravity-equation framework, we try to see to what extent the bilateral trade flows between the US and different countries differ from a gravity-type...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...