The number of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements has surged in recent years. In order to benefit from preferential tariff rates,firms must apply and comply with rules of origin requirements. This is costly and explains why preference utilization rates (PUR) are far below 100 percent. In...

This dissertation exploits fine-grained trade data to study how the evasion of trade sanctions may be detected, which factors determine the utilisation of free trade agreements, and how to improve the quality of intertemporal product-level trade data.