Does higher income cause democracy? Accounting for the dynamic nature and high persistence of income and democracy, we find a statistically significant positive relation between income and democracy for a postwar period sample of up to 150 countries. Our results are robust across different...

One consequence of tariff evasion is that a country’s average statutory import tariff rate deviates from the average applied tariff rate. We deliver an approach to estimate the average evasion rate in multi-country general equilibrium. We find evidence of significant average tariff evasion...

This paper estimates the impact of time zone differences between trading locations on trade costs and trade in general equilibrium. Using homogeneous bilateral trade data between US states and Canadian provinces, time zone differences are found to reduce bilateral trade by 11% on average, which...

This letter uses an augmented gravity model to revisit the effect of similarity in income distributions on bilateral trade flows. We document a robust new empirical regularity: while differences in average incomes between two countries increase trade, differences in income dispersion reduce it....

We sort out confounding factors in the empirical link between bilateral migration and trade. Using newly available panel data on developing countries' diaspora to rich OECD nations in a theory-grounded gravity model, we uncover a robust, causal pro-trade effect. Moreover, we do not find evidence...

Using a cross-section of countries, we adapt Frankel and Romer's (1999) IV strategy to international labor mobility. Controlling for institutional quality, trade, and financial openness, we establish a robust and non-negative causal effect of immigration on real per capita income.