What drives globalization today and in the past? We employ a new micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs based on a standard model of trade in differentiated goods to address this question. These trade costs gauge the difference between observed bilateral trade and frictionless trade....

"We use a new measure of total trade costs at the bilateral country level to examine the change in international trade integration between 1870 and 1913. Trade costs are lowest amongst the most developed countries and highest in the peripheral and poor countries. On average, our measure declined...