The Euro Effect on Trade is Not as Large as Commonly Thought

Existing studies on the impact of the euro on goods trade report increments between 5% and 40%. These estimates are based on standard panel gravity models for the level of trade. We show that the residuals from these models exhibit upwards trends over time for the euro countries, and that this leads to an upward bias in the estimated euro effect. To correct for that, we extend the standard model by including a time trend that may have different effects across country-pairs. This shrinks the estimated euro impact to 3%