Economic theory has made considerable progress in explaining why sovereign countries cooperate in trade. Central to most theories of trade cooperation are issues of self-enforcement: The threat of reprisal by an aggrieved party maintains the initial balance of concessions and prevents...

This paper compares the impact of distance, a standard proxy for trade costs, on eBay and offline international trade flows. It considers the same set of 62 countries and the same basket of goods for both types of transactions, and finds the effect of distance to be on average 65 percent smaller...

This paper constitutes an attempt to reframe and eventually deflate the ongoing “compliance-vs.-rebalancing” debate which has permeated WTO scholarship for the last 10 years. At face value, this controversy circles around object and purpose of WTO enforcement and the legal nature of dispute...

We use a new US-firm-level dataset covering all domestic and international sales made through eBay, an online marketplace, to provide insights about firm heterogeneity in online international trade. One is that the share of firms that export is surprisingly high, at 85%.

As part of its sanctions regime, the United States recently announced imposition of punitive import tariffs on 570 product groups from Russia. The European Union may follow suit and enact sanctions on Russia that mirror the U.S. sanctions in scale and scope. Using a sector-specific...

Following deliberations with its partners at the recent G7 Summit in Germany, the United States announced the imposition of significantly higher tariffs on products from Russia. These tariff increases concern 570 groups of products affecting more than $2 billion in imports from Russia. The...

Increasing the de minimis threshold (DMT) for imports in Canada would generate significant benefits for Canadians, finds a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Rights of Passage: The Economic Effects of Raising the DMT Threshold in Canada,” authors Christine McDaniel, Simon Schropp...