World trade evolves at two margins. Where a bilateral trading relationship already exists it may increase through time (intensive margin). But trade may also increase if a trading bilateral relationship is newly established between countries that have not traded with each other in the past...

Cultural proximity may influence bilateral imports through a preference and a trade-cost channel. In empirical gravity models, conventional measures such as common language or religion fail to separately identify those channels. We use bilateral score data from the Eurovision Song Contest, a...

Recent literature has argued that, contrary to the results of a seminal paper by Rose (2004), WTO membership does promote bilateral trade, at least for developed economies and if membership includes non-formal compliance. We review the literature in order to identify open issues. We then develop...

Using a cross-section of countries, we adapt Frankel and Romer's (1999) IV strategy to international labor mobility. Controlling for institutional quality, trade, and financial openness, we establish a robust and non-negative causal effect of immigration on real percapita income.

A unilateral tax on CO2 emissions may drive up indirect carbon imports from non-committed countries, leading to carbon leakage. Using a gravity model of carbon trade, we analyze the effect of the Kyoto Protocol on the carbon content of bilateral trade. We construct a novel data set of CO2...