We develop a structural framework that allows us to quantify the evolution of aggregate bilateral trade costs and … in trade flows. We apply our method to trade data between 1990 and 2015 for the world’s 100 largest economies. We find … costs have fallen by 3.1% per year on average, we find a strong negative correlation between observed trade cost and markup …

the major issue is that of data scarcity. Due to these facts both domestic and asymmetric trade costs have been ignored … gaps between theory and practice. The results of this work show that domestic trade costs proportionally grow with economic … size, and that international trade costs are highly asymmetric especially when trading pair sizes differ. Counterfactual …

Trade facilitation policy focuses on accelerated and transparent shipment processing to reduce trade costs. A common … costs. Our theory considers that shipment processing times at the port of entry are random and firms choose lead times to …, and firm-product-origin level import data to estimate import processing costs. Evaluated at the median, import processing …

We estimate import processing costs based on the time it takes to import. Our theory extends existing time … and import values to provide evidence for our theory and estimate processing costs consistent with the theory. The … evidence shows that our extensions to time-cost estimates are economically relevant to determine processing costs. We estimate …