Since June 2007, the EU and India have been negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement, but negotiations broke down in 2013. Nevertheless, both sides have expressed their desire to revive talks on the Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA). To quantify potential economic...

Since June 2007, the EU and India have been negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement, but negotiations broke down in 2013. Nevertheless, both sides have expressed their desire to revive talks on the Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA). To quantify potential economic...

On 9 december 2016, the upper house of Japan's parliament approved the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pushed for the TPP's ratification despite US President Trump's decision to pull out the deal, insisting it would send a signal about Japan's continuing support to...

Climate research suggests that global warming will lead to more frequent and more extreme natural disasters. Most disasters are local events with effects on local economic growth. Hence, assessing their economic impacts with the help of econometric country-level analysis may lead to biased...

We develop a simple methodology to estimate monthly aggregate supply and demand conditions from bilateral international trade data for about 180 countries and 40 years. We apply our method to measure the short-run effects of natural disasters. In line with theoretical considerations, we find...

Does trade openness cause higher GDP per capita? Since the seminal instrumental variables (IV) estimates of Frankel and Romer [F&R](1999) important doubts have surfaced. Is the correlation spurious and driven by omitted geographical and institutional variables? In this paper, we generalize F&R's...

Growth theory predicts that natural disasters should, on impact, lower GDP per capita. However, the empirical literature does not offer conclusive evidence. Most existing studies use disaster data drawn from damage records of insurance companies. We argue that this may lead to estimation bias as...