Environmental agreements represent voluntary coalitions which mostly regulate emissions and the exhaustion of natural resources. The analysis of why and under which conditions countries (or policy makers) may be inclined toward ratifying such agreements or not has been the focus of a body of...

To assess the welfare effects of bilateral versus multilateral trade and/or investment liberalisation in general equilibrium, we set up a three-country and three-factor knowledge-capital model of trade and multinational activity. Numerical simulation results indicate that multilateral...

This paper analyzes the effects of EU integration on intra-EU trade volumes with a special focus on trade within and between the core and the periphery countries. We find that in all phases of integration core-periphery and intra-periphery growth of trade has experienced stronger positive...

This paper examines the consequences of model misspecification using a panel data model with spatially autocorrelated disturbances. The performance of several maximum likelihood estimators assuming different specifications for this model are compared using Monte Carlo experiments. These include...

The paper proposes a distinction between the two dimensions of convergence - within and between countries - when analyzing the impact of cross-border outsourcing on real wage rates in the EU-15 and the CEEC. In the CEEC, international outsourcing has not affected the adjustment of average real...

The overwhelming importance of multinational activities as well as the coexistence of exporters and multinationals within the developed countries demand for theoretical models which provide a convincing explanation of simultaneous two-way trade and horizontal multinational activities. We present...

This paper assesses the determinants of European outward and inward processing trade. Thereby, it distinguishes between size, relative factor endowment, (other) cost factors and infrastructure variables. Using a large panel of bilateral processing trade flows of the EU12 countries at the...

This paper compares four different estimators with respect to their suitability for cross-section gravity model estimation. In many circumstances, a Hausman-Taylor approach can be recommended. This framework may provide consistent parameter estimates, when OLS or the traditional random-effects...

This paper assesses the role of intra-sectoral spillovers in total factor productivity across Chinese producers in the chemical industry. We use a rich panel data-set of 12,552 firms observed over the period 2004 - 2006 and model output by the firm as a function of skilled and unskilled labor,...