There exists strong commonality in credit risk across sovereigns [Pan and Singleton (2008); Longstaff, Pan, Pedersen and Singleton (2011)]. This paper embeds this commonality into a rating-based, reduced-form model. A parsimonious version of the rating-based model can adequately capture the...

We assume that all trade costs take the iceberg form and find that distance is responsible for about 40% of the world trade costs. Our results are robust to the choice of the trade model, the sample period, the country groups in terms of income level, and the trade cost elasticity of trade...

In this work we use an augmented Eaton-Kortum model to estimate the distribution costs of a group of consumption goods for 60 countries. Our results accord well with the distribution costs derived directly from the input-output tables for a slightly different group of goods. Our counterfactual...