Exporters’ performance in a particular market may affect their future exports to the rest of the world. Importers may base their future transaction decisions upon the information revealed by exporters’ past performance in other countries. Similarly, exporters acquire valuable information on...

The negotiations on trade in services at the WTO have so far produced little liberalization beyond levels unilaterally undertaken by countries. One reason is the neglect of the traditional negotiating principle of reciprocity. In particular, there has been a failure to exploit the scope built...

As each new round of multilateral trade negotiations approaches, there is a demand for a negotiating rule that would give credit for autonomous liberalization. This Paper shows that the desirability and feasibility of such a rule depends on when it is instituted. A credit rule established at the...

We embed a model of the labor market with sector-specific search-and-matching frictions into a Ricardian model with a continuum of goods to show that trade liberalization causes higher unemployment in countries with comparative advantage in sectors with strong labor market frictions and leads to...

In the case of natural monopolies there tends to be a trade-off between a higher quality of output provided by private firms, and a better access for poor consumers provided by public firms. This is partly the reflection of differences in objectives by private and public firms. The former tend...

We compare the impact of distance, a standard proxy for trade costs, on eBay and offline international trade flows. We consider the same set of 62 countries and the same basket of goods for both types of transactions. We find the effect of distance to be on average 65 percent smaller on the eBay...

To study the effects of tariffs on GDP one needs import demand elasticities at the tariff line level that are consistent with GDP maximization. These do not exist. We modify Kohli’s (1991) GDP function approach to estimate demand elasticities for 4625 imported goods in 117 countries. Following...

Information is costly to acquire in trade and financial markets, especially across international borders. Sellers and buyers rely on information and experiences of other firms, including from business partners located in other countries. This Paper identifies three channels through which...

The objective of this paper is to provide indicators of trade restrictiveness that include both measures of tariff and non-tariff barriers for 91 developing and developed countries. For each country, we estimate three trade restrictiveness indices. The first one captures the extent to which...

This Paper proposes a new method to test the Grossman-Helpman model of endogenous protection and lobby formation. This method, which does not require outside data on lobbies or contributions, identifies politically organized industries for trade protection purposes and calculates equilibrium...