Traditional literature takes gravity variables, regional economic agreement formation, and economy similarity as exogenous variables when discussing the determinants of the bilateral trade flows. This research uses the bilateral trade information from 1986 to 2008 and the common types of trade...

This paper compares various specifications of the gravity model of trade which are commonly used in the literature. It shows that most of them can be regarded as nested versions of a general specification in which the heterogeneity of bilateral country-pair fixed effects is accounted for. This...