In 1981-82, the United States imposed a set of far-reaching extraterritorial restraints on sales of oil and gas transmission equipment and technology to the Soviet Union in an effort to prevent or delay completion of the Yamal natural gas pipeline. This touched off the most violent dispute over...

Physical considerations alone cannot explain the volatile behavior of resource prices, or the effects these have on different regions of the world. An optimization analysis may not suffice either, since typically there are several distinct objectives: conservation, cost-minimization, and the...

This paper studies the importance of intangible barriers to trade in explaining variation in disaggregate international trade. The analysis is based on a sample of 55 countries for the year 2000. We explicitly focus on the importance of institutional and cultural dimensions of distance. Our...

This paper presents a trade model with capital and labor as factors of production. The main contribution of this paper is that it considers a new type of firm heterogeneity, which is empirically relevant: firms in this paper differ with respect to their factor shares in production. Therefore,...

Recent empirical evidence has shown that trade liberalization promotes innovation and productivity growth in individual firms. This paper argues that different types of trade liberalization - multilateral versus regional - may lead to different R&D and productivity levels of firms. Trade...

A central argument for trade liberalization is that when the 'gains from trade' are shared, countries see large gains in economic development. In this paper, I empirically evaluate this argument and assess the impact of elite capture on regional development. Africa provides a unique study ground...