There is a growing number of studies that investigate the effect of trade liberalization on productivity and nearly all assume that trade policy is independently determined of productivity, hence it is exogenous. I show that this assumption is generally invalid both theoretically and...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are characterized by liberalization with respect to only a few partners and thus they can potentially clash with, and retard multilateral trade liberalization (MTL). Yet there is almost no systematic evidence on whether the numerous existing PTAs actually...

This paper considers the impact of preferential trade liberalization (PTL) on multilateral trade liberalization (MTL), focusing on the European Union. The model that we develop, which builds on Limão (2002), captures key features of the multilateral system and of recent PTAs and generates...