International trade policies are often compared across countries and over time for a variety of purposes. Analysts use such measures as arithmetic or trade-weighted average tariffs, Non-Tariff Barrier (NTB) coverage ratios and measures of tariff dispersion. All such measures are without...

Historical evidence suggests that Mafias originally formed to provide enforcement of legitimate property rights when state enforcement was weak. We provide a general equilibrium model of Mafias as enforcement coalitions which protect property from predators. Both the level of predation and the...

The gravity model has been widely used to infer substantial trade flow effects of institutions such as customs unions and exchange rate mechanisms. McCallum [1995] found that the US-Canada border led to trade between provinces that was a factor 22 (2,200%) times trade between states and...

Corruption and imperfect contract enforcement dramatically reduce trade. This paper estimates the reduction, using a structural model of import demand in which transactions costs impose a price markup on traded goods. We find that inadequate institutions constrain trade far more than tariffs do....

Human mortality patterns are modeled as the loss of an individual’s vitality, a measure of survival capacity, by senescence or when random extrinsic challenges exceed the remaining vitality. The model characterizes the stochastic rate of loss of vitality as a Wiener process and random...

Technological change in the form of aquaculture is becoming an important factor m the market for several species of fish. In the light of those changes, producers in some ocean-based fishenes need to evaluate their production and pricing strategies relative to their emerging...

This report studies impediments to investment and private sector development in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and Serbia and Montenegro. It aims to yield fundamentally new insights for improving the region's...

We estimate geographic barriers to trade in nine service categories for Canada's provinces from 1997 to 2007 with novel high quality bilateral provincial trade data. The border directly reduces average provincial trade with the US relative to interprovincial trade to 2.4% of its borderless...

We extend the structural gravity model to identify external economies or diseconomies of scale elasticities of cross-border trade. We find statistically and quantitatively significant economies of scale in cross-border trade in 5/8ths of sector-direction cases for Canadian provinces while the...

This paper infers the terms of trade effects of the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) of the 1990s. Using panel data methods to resolve two way causality between trade and FTAs, we estimate large FTA effects on bilateral trade volume in digit manufacturing goods from 1990-2002. We deduce the terms of...