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 dissertation was prepared by Alexander-Nikolai Sandkamp, completed in September 2018 and first published online by LMU Munich in February 2019. It consists of four selfcontained chapters that empirically investigate different trade dampening phenomena using gravity analysis. The first two...

Trade in services is often hampered by domestic administrative barriers, even when countries are members of the same regional trade agreement. We exploit a large reform in the European Union (the EU Service Directive) targeted to reduce such administrative hurdles in cross-border service...

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...

A meta-analysis explains the variation in estimated trade effects of technical barriers to trade broadly defined, using available estimates from the empirical international trade literature, and accounting for data sampling and methodology differences. Agriculture and food industries tend to be...

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...

This paper constructs a model of trade consequences of terrorism, where firms in trading nations face different costs arising from domestic and transnational terrorism. Using dyadic dataset in a gravity model, we test terrorism’s effects on overall trade, exports, and imports, while...

We propose and apply methods to quantify the impact of national institutions on international trade and development. We are able to identify the direct impact of country-specific institutions on international trade within the structural gravity framework. Our approach naturally addresses the...