The information and communication technology (ICT) revolution of the past 3 decades has transformed the world into an integrated marketplace. Today, producers and consumers alike are able to compare the prices of local businesses and worldwide sellers. For an increasing number of tradable goods,...

In today's internet markets consumers can search for, find and compare prices worldwide. Online, information circulates faster than offline and arbitrage opportunities such as the ones arising from currency shocks are easily unveiled. In this paper, we estimate for the first time exchange rate...

The information and communication technology (ICT) revolution of the past 3 decades has transformed the world into an integrated marketplace. Today, producers and consumers alike are able to compare the prices of local businesses and worldwide sellers. For an increasing number of tradable goods,...

This paper quantifies the impact of international transport time on bilateral trade flows in goods using previously unexploited information drawn from a large dataset on international parcel delivery times. In line with previous work, we find that an extra day spent in international transit...

There is increasing empirical evidence that vertical product differentiation is an important determinant of international trade. However, the economic literature so far has solely focused on the case in which quality trade stems from differences between countries. No studies investigate the role...

The authors show in this paper that increasing the transparency of the trading environment can be an important complement to traditional liberalization of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Our definition of transparency is grounded in a transaction cost analysis. The authors focus on two...

This paper studies the production and trade linkages between a selected group of economies belonging to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). After defining a group of Belt and Road Economies, the paper uses three standard trade databases to analyze trade and production linkages among these...

We build a political-economy model of 'trade policy substitution' – namely, substitution of tariffs with non-tariff measures – as a function of differentials between domestic and foreign firms in the costs of complying with product standards. Our model suggests trade policy substitution in...