Two seemingly unconnected empirical results suggest an intriguing mechanism. First, economic integration helps harmonize prices internationally, with trade being the primary channel (Rogoff 1996, Goldberg and Knetter 1997). Second, monetary union may greatly increase the amount of trade among...

This paper investigates how exchange rates affect the utilization of a free trade agreement (FTA) scheme in trading. Changes in exchange rates affect FTA utilization by two ways. The first way is by changing the excess profits gained by utilizing the FTA scheme, and the second way is by...

We study cross-country price differences in the European market for new passenger cars based on detailed pricing and technical data. Car prices in Europe converged until the year 2003, but not thereafter. Within the EU 15 countries the price range of the median model in 2004 was close to 20...

The paper analyses the evolution of the trade specialisation pattern in the ten countries which will join the EU in 2004, by studying the dynamics of their comparative advantages over the period 1993-2000. The study finds that, although some countries are still broadly relying on natural...

This paper analyses the relationship between openness to trade and wages at the industry level (15 manufacturing industries) in 25 EU countries over the period from 1995 to 2005. By applying a cross-country and industry-specific approach, it is possible to control for unobserved heterogeneity at...

We identify the effect of financial integration on international business cycle synchronization, by utilizing a confidential database on banks’ bilateral exposure and employing a country-pair panel instrumental variables approach. Countries that become more integrated over time have less...

The purpose of this paper is to explain the relation between the Border Effect and industrial concentration. This is achieved by founding this relation on the Home Market Effect and testing the robustness of this foundation through an application to the European Single Market. A sectorial...

There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the quality content of Chinese exports and to what extent China imposes a threat to the market positions of advanced economies. While China’s export structure is very similar to that of the advanced world, its export unit values are well below...

This paper examines the evolution of the variety of Mexico’s export goods using disaggregated trade data. Both the econometric estimation analyses using the raw data and the one using an improved version of Feenstra and Kee's (2004, 2007) methodology proposed in this paper show that NAFTA...

In this study, we argue that the conventional intra-industry trade (IIT) index does not address the quality issue directly and propose a methodology to make full use of unit-price gap information to deduce quality differences between simultaneously exported and imported products. By applying...