A large literature documents the impact of borders on trade. However, in all these studies border effects are identified from cross-sectional variation alone. We do not know the "treatment effect" of borders nor can we rule out reverse causation. Here, we exploit the border changes imposed...

This paper explores the pre-First World War Austro-Hungarian economy as a prominent case where growing conflict between various ethnic and national groups within an empire might have contributed to the emergence of internal borders and even its eventual dissolution. To this end we adopt an...

The First World War radically altered the political landscape of Central Europe. The new borders after 1918 are typically viewed as detrimental to the region's economic integration and development. We argue that this view lacks historical perspective. It fails to take into account that the new...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in national border demarcation on economic integration. It treats the national breakups in Central Europe due to WWI as a natural experiment. The set-up allows to control for selection bias when estimating the impact of national borders on trade. A...

This paper investigates the evidence for convergence in per capita incomes across 115 economies during the period 1950–1998 and examines the impact that international trade had on this process. Drawing on trade-conditioning within a distribution dynamics framework, that explicitly models...