This paper revisits the relationship between international trade and economic growth. We measure trade openness indices separately with respect to intermediate inputs and final goods and find that it is the former which turns out to be significant in explaining growth gains from trade. Using...

The classical Wage Fund (Capital or Credit) framework is integrated with the simplest text-book version of the Ricardian model of comparative advantage, generating a model that replicates important features of the neo-classical production theory involving capital and labour without neo-classical...

We analyze how trade openness matters for interstate conflict over productive resources. Our analysis features a terms-of-trade channel that makes security policies trade-regime dependent. Specifically, trade between two adversaries reduces each one’s incentive to arm given the opponent’s...

Inequalities between workers of different skills have been growing in the era of globalization. Firms’ internationalization mode has an impact on job stability. Exporting firms are not only exposed to different foreign shocks, they also pay skill-intensive fixed costs to serve foreign markets....

Trade facilitation policy focuses on accelerated and transparent shipment processing to reduce trade costs. A common measure to evaluate processing frictions is the time it takes to import. In this paper we translate import processing times to costs. Our theory considers that shipment processing...

In this paper we revisit the influential theory of monopolistic competition and optimum product variety as developed by Dixit and Stiglitz (1977) with applications in international trade by Krugman (1979,1980), by modeling fixed and variable costs of production in terms of underlying use of...

We use anonymized data from Facebook to construct a new measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 180 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more with each other when they are more socially connected and when they share social connections with a similar...

The economic effects of a pandemic crucially depend on the extend to which countries are connected in global production networks. In this paper we incorporate production barriers induced by COVID-19 shock into a Ricardian model with sectoral linkages, trade in intermediate goods and sectoral...

Gravity as both fact and theory is one of the great success stories of recent research on international trade, and has featured prominently in the policy debate over Brexit. We first review the facts, noting the overwhelming evidence that trade tends to fall with distance. We then introduce some...