Most empirical policy work requires the aggregation of policies. Trade policy aggregation exemplifies the aggregation problem poignantly, with thousands of highly dispersed trade barriers. This paper provides methods of policy aggregation that are consistent with two common objectives of...

Starting in 1985, Colombia experienced gradual trade liberalization that culminated in the drastic tariff reductions of 1990-91. This paper exploits these trade reforms to investigate the relationship between protection and wages. The focus of the analysis is on relative wages, defined as...

Trade reform conditions are common in IMF supported programs. Of the 99 countries that had IMF programs during 1993-2003, 77 had conditions on trade reforms in their programs. Since the WTO has not been found especially effective in promoting trade openness for most developing countries, it is...

We investigate the effects of the drastic tariff reductions of the 1980s and 1990s in Colombia on the wage distribution. We identify three main channels through which the wage distribution was affected: increasing returns to college education, changes in industry wages that hurt sectors with...

The implications of national security related procedures for trade flows at border points in OECD countries has become a major topic of commentary in popular press. We discuss whether the economic costs of border delays are represented solely by time spent in awaiting processing. This has been...

We examine whether the Colombian trade reform can explain any of Colombia's decline in urban poverty between 1984 and 1995. Our approach focuses on short- and medium- run channels through which trade reform could affect poverty. Despite the chronological coincidence of the poverty reduction with...

The effects of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are disputed. In this paper, we assess these effects using capital market data and an event-study approach, using a daily data set covering a thousand announcements spanning over eighty economies and a hundred RTAs over twenty recent years. We...

This paper uses computational techniques to assess whether or not various propositions that have been advanced as plausible in the literature on Customs Unions (or other regional trade agreements) may actually hold. The idea is to make probabilistic statements as to whether propositions of...

This paper seeks to contribute to discussion of the reasonableness of sometimes seemingly innocent assumptions used in theoretical trade models that the direction of trade is both predetermined for each good for each country and fixed. Here, we provide computational evidence as to the...

A network/search view of international trade in differentiated products is proposed. It is shown that this view can explain the importance of ethnic and extended family ties in trade, the success of diversified trading intermediaries such as Japan's sogo shosha, and the ubiquity of government...