The firms' international fragmentation of production has recently widened its focus from outsourcing of intermediates to off-shoring of business services such as software program development and international call centre networks. Although a large number of business services are intangible and...

Fixed effects (FE) in panel data models overlap each other and prohibit the identification of the impact of ''constant'' regressors. Think of regressors that are constant across countries in a country-time panel with time FE. The traditional approach is to drop some FE and constant regressors by...

Determinants of trade among various Indian states have been poorly studied in the literature. In this paper, we examine the nature of agricultural trade among Indian states and identify why certain states export more than others, and what governs trade among these Indian states. Using data...

Making use of considerably improved measures of infrastructure, we assess the impact of infrastructure on bilateral trade for a panel of 37 developed and emerging economies during the period 1995-2011. We find significant and non-linear effects of overall infrastructure and infrastructure in...

The issues of zero trade observations and the validity of the log linear transformation of the gravity equation have generated a number of debates in the literature with differing claims about the most suitable estimation technique. To produce unbiased and consistent estimates for policy making,...

We try to achieve this objective in four steps. First, we focus on the original Armington CES gravity model, as a representative framework for a large class of GE models, to offer a deep analysis of the structural relationships underlying the general equilibrium gravity system, and how they can...

Then, we integrate the latest developments in the empirical gravity literature and we offer six recommendations to obtain reliable partial equilibrium estimates of the effects of bilateral and non-discriminatory trade policies within the same comprehensive, and theoretically-consistent...

The objective of this manuscript is to serve as a practical guide for estimations with the structural gravity model. After a brief review of the theoretical foundations, we summarize the main challenges with gravity estimations and we review the solutions to address those challenges. Then, we...

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has led to the independence of fifteen new states. Twelve of these, including Ukraine, joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) whose goal was to form a common economic space with free movement of goods, labor and capital. Twenty five years...

This paper presents a theoretical gravity model of trade in which foreign aid is considered as a transfer instead of being part of the trade cost, as it has been previously done in the related literature. We argue that the usual specification leads to invalid out-of-sample predictions, biased...