Over the time a large number of reciprocal preferential trade agreements (RTAs) have been concluded among countries. Recently many studies have used gravity equations in order to estimate the effect of RTAs on trade flows between partners. These studies report very different estimates since they...

Twelve econometric studies investigating the impact of agoa presented in this paper have reported 174 different estimates. In testing for publication bias and whether there is a genuine empirical impact of agoa we resort to a meta-analysis. The meta-analysis provides us with a formal means of...

This paper shows that the Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood estimator applied to the gravity model produces estimates in which, summing across all partners, actual and estimated total trade flows are identical. Other methods such as OLS do not have this desirable property. Indeed, Poisson is the...

This paper proposes new estimation techniques for gravity models with zero trade values and heteroscedasticity. We revisit the standard PPML estimator and we propose an improved version. We also propose various Heckman estimators with different distributions of the residuals, nonlinear forms of...

Advances in gravity literature have presented econometric approaches for the theoretically consistent estimation of structural gravity. When estimating the impact of policy-shocks on trade values however, researchers are confronted with two problems. Once multilateral resistances are taken into...

The paper sets up a calculation of the effective exchange rate for Slovenia, and compares it to the methodologies used by the IMF, BIS, European Commission and ECB. Additionally we construct smaller regional effective exchange rates that help to explain the robustness of the Slovene export...

This paper analyses the reaction of the minerals industry to external demand developments in South Africa. This is achieved by augmenting a Taylor1993 rule type central bank monetary policy reaction function with an indicator of external demand. The empirical results provide evidence of a...

There is an ostensible relationship between whether or not a nation is developed and the interpretation and collection of data in this nation. For instance, if a country is developing, it is difficult to collect figures, though much simpler to interpret them. The opposite is the case in a...

We consider the randomness of market trade as the origin of price and return stochasticity. We look at time series of trade values and volumes as random variables during the averaging interval Δ and describe the dependences of market-based volatilities of price and return on the volatilities...

We analyse the time evolution of the empirical cross-sectional distribution of firms profit and growth rates. In particular, we analyse the conditional properties of the empirical distributions depending on the size of the firms and business cycle phase. In order to do so, we employ the Laplace...