Trade costs are crucial in new economic geography (NEG) models. The unavailability of actual trade costs data requires the approximation of trade costs. Most NEG studies do not deal with the ramifications of the particular trade costs specification used. This paper shows that the specification...

Economists have long debated whether the real exchange rate (RER) has a significant impact on export performance and output growth. Some claim that export performance depends only on nonprice competition and the RER is irrelevant to long-run growth, whereas others argue that the RER is a key...

In this paper, I estimate the impact of heterogeneity in non-tariff measures policies on countries’ global value chain-related trade and its backward and forward components. I first build a regulatory distance index, which measures the degree of dissimilarity in non-tariff measure structures...