Free trade in audio-visual services has faced opposition on the grounds that foreign media undermine domestic culture, and ultimately, global diversity. We assess the media-culture link using name frequencies as a measure of tastes. Using a 47-year panel of French birth registries, we first show...

This paper studies the relationship between bilateral trade patterns and opinions. It uses the Eurobarometer public opinion surveys published by the European Commission, which provide data on the share of the population in each EU member country in favour of each CEEC joining the EU. Our results...

Recent years have seen a surge in regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the development of non-tariff measures (NTMs). As a consequence, a growing number of RTAs include provisions on NTMs. This paper investigates the effect of standards-harmonization clauses contained in many North-South...

Transferring low tech manufacturing jobs to cheap labour countries is often seen by part of the general public and policy makers as a step into the de-industrialisation of the European economies. However, several recent contributions have shown that the effects on home economies are rarely...

This paper analyses theoretically and empirically the relationship between trade and war. We show that the intuition that trade promotes peace is only partially true even in a model where trade is beneficial to all, war reduces trade and leaders take into account the costs of war. When war can...

Recent theoretical work on economic geography emphasizes the interplay of transport costs and plant-level increasing returns. In these models, the spatial distribution of demand is a key determinant of economic outcomes. In one strand, it is argued that higher demand gives rise to a more than...

Using data on name distributions in 95 French departments observed from 1946 to 2002, we investigate spatial and social mechanisms behind the transmission of parental preferences. Drawing inspiration from recent work on social interactions, we develop a simple discrete choice model that predicts...

We identify in this Paper the level of trade integration between the three largest economic powers of the world, often called the Triad: The United States, the EU and Japan. We focus on measuring possible asymmetries in market access between members of the Triad using border effects between each...

Knickerbocker (1973) introduced ‘oligopolistic reaction’ to explain why firms follow rivals into foreign markets. We develop a model that incorporates central features of Knickerbocker's story-oligopoly, uncertainty, and risk aversion-to establish the conditions required to generate...

The majority of independent nations today were part of empires in 1945. Using bilateral trade data from 1948 to 2006, we examine the effect of independence on post-colonial trade. On average, there is little short run effect of trade with the colonizer (metropole). However, after three decades...