The number of preferential trade agreements has greatly increased over the past two decades, yet most existing arrangements take the form of free trade areas, and less than 10% can be considered to be fully fledged customs unions. This paper develops a political economy model of trade policy...

Most of the expansion of global trade since 1980 has been of the North–South kind — between capital-abundant developed and labour-abundant developing countries. Based on this observation, I argue that the recent growth of world trade is best understood from a factor-proportions perspective....

This paper uses detailed household expenditure and firm production data to study the welfare consequences of the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip between mid-2007 and mid-2010. Using the West Bank as a counterfactual economy, we find that welfare declined by 14%–27%. Moreover, households...

We introduce a simple but flexible analytical framework in which both trade in goods and trade in tasks arise. We use this framework to provide versions of the gains-from-trade and the famous four HO theorems (Heckscher–Ohlin, factor-price-equalisation, Stolper–Samuelson, and Rybczynski)...

This paper connects trade flows to deviations from the law of one price (LOOP) in a structural model of trade and retailing. It accounts for the observed cross-country dispersion in prices of goods, based on retail price survey data, by focusing on two sources of goods market segmentation —...

The breakdown of global factor price equalization, or a single-cone world, is a central concern in various fields of economics. This paper examines the empirical validities of the following two claims: 1) the multiple-cone Heckscher–Ohlin (HO) model fits better than does the single-cone HO...