How strongly can trade facilitation benefit trade? We study the most comprehensive trade facilitation measure possible – complete elimination of customs points – within the Eurasian Customs Union EACU). The EACU abolished internal customs controls between its members in two stages, which...

In this paper we document border effects in the award of public contracts in the European Single Market. We use a data set of 1.8 million contract awards that have been matched to geo-locations to estimate a gravity model of procurement flows between European NUTS3 region pairs. Cross-national...

How strongly can the reduction in bureaucracy and red tape at the border increase trade? To address this, we study an ambitious trade facilitation policy - the complete abolition of internal customs controls - in the Eurasian Customs Union. Using a structural gravity model with high-dimensional...

This paper first provides a brief overview of the literature on market segmentation and then presents an empirical exercise that sheds more light on the significance of border effects across European countries. The literature suggests that integration in the EU goods and financial markets is...

A standard finding in the political economy of trade policy literature is that we should expect export-oriented industries to attract more assistance than import-competing industries. In reality, however, trade policy is heavily biased toward supporting import industries. This paper shows within...

This paper empirically examines the heterogeneity in the effects of multiple dimensions of distance on trade across detailed product groups. Using finite mixture modelling on bilateral trade data at the 3-digit SITC level, we endogenously group product categories into an, a priori unknown,...

The home market effect (HME) is commonly defined as a more than proportional supply response to a demand shock. Recent theoretical literature, however, shows that predictions from the traditional twocountry framework do not always survive in multi-country settings. This is because ‘third’...