Does globalization widen inequality or increase income risk? Globalization amplifies the effect of idiosyncratic relative productivity shocks. But wider markets reduce the effect of economy-wide supply shocks on world prices. Both forces are at work in the specific factors continuum model of...

This paper provides benchmarks of trade restrictiveness and year- on-year changes in trade restrictiveness using the Trade Restrictiveness Index. These benchmark measures stand in sharp contrast to standard measures. For a 28 country sample the TRI is used to compare trade policy in a recent...

The fact that raising taxes can increase taxed labor supply through income effects is frequently used to justify very much lower measures of the marginal welfare cost of taxes and greater public good provision than indicated by traditional, compensated analyses. We confirm that this difference...

There isn't nearly as much trade as standard models suggest there should be. Formal trade barriers and transport costs are too low to account for the difference. The pattern of missing trade has interesting variation across country pairs. These clues suggest the need for theoretical and...

We show that the effects of tariff changes on welfare and import volume can be fully characterised by their effects on the generalised mean and variance of the tariff distribution. Using these tools, we derive new results for welfare- and market-access-improving tariff changes, which imply two...

Economic integration lowers one form of trade costs, tariffs, and stimulates changes in other trade costs. This paper offers a model in which integration may raise or lower the important trade cost associated with insecurity. The model can help to explain the varied experience with integration...

Neglected properties of the structural gravity model offer a theoretically consistent method to calculate the incidence of estimated trade costs, disaggregated by commodity and region, and re-aggregated into forms useful for economic geography. For Canada's provinces, 1992-2003, incidence is on...

Predation---extortion or theft---imposes significant endogenous costs on trade, with rich implications for trade policy. The model of this paper shows that the response of trade to liberalization depends on the strength of enforcement against predators. Efficient commercial policy may either tax...

Contract enforcement is probabilistic, but the probability depends on rules and processes. A stimulus to trade may induce traders to alter rules or processes to improve enforcement. In the model of this paper, such a positive knock-on effect occurs when the elasticity of supply of traders is...