We investigate how protectionist policies influence short-run economic growth. Our empirical strategy exploits an extraordinary tax scandal that gave rise to an unexpected change of government in Sweden. A free-trade majority in parliament was overturned by a protectionist majority in 1887. We...

In this paper, we study how contract enforcement at the local level affects a firm's ability to supply customised intermediate inputs to foreign firms. Using Italian firm-level data, we show that firms located in courts with higher judicial trial length in civil disputes, which is our measure of...

We propose a structural alternative to the Economic Complexity Index (ECI, Hidalgo and Hausmann 2009; Hausmann et al. 2011) that ranks countries by their complexity. This ranking is tied to comparative advantages. Hence, it reveals information different from GDP per capita on the deep underlying...

The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), launched in 2004, is a unified European Union (EU) policy framework towards the EU neighboring (ENP) countries. The objective of the ENP is to strengthen the prosperity, stability and security of the (enlarged) EU countries and the ENP countries. Even...

The number of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements has surged in recent years. In order to benefit from preferential tariff rates,firms must apply and comply with rules of origin requirements. This is costly and explains why preference utilization rates (PUR) are far below 100 percent. In...

Using quarterly data of 58 countries, this paper provides empirical evidence that mobile phone diffusion from 2007 to 2009 is positively influenced by international network effects. Direct and indirect network effects are a result of the international standadization of telecommunication...

It is assumed in new trade theory and new economic geography that the supply of labor is fixed, which is not true in real labor markets. We develop a model of new trade theory by incorporating an elastic labor supply and analyze the impacts of technological progress on the equilibrium outcomes...

We evaluate whether survey-based indicators produce lower forecast errors for export growth than indicators obtained from hard data such as price and cost competitiveness measures. Our pseudo out-of-sample analyzes and forecast encompassing tests reveal that survey-based indicators outperform...

This paper explores the quantitative consequences of transatlantic trade liberalization envisioned in a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union. Our key innovation is to develop a new quantitative spatial trade model and to use an...

We study the link between air accessibility (measured by non-stop flights offer) and the manufacturing export of the Italian regions in Europe using a panel of 12,000 half-yearly observations ranging from 1998 to 2010. The analysis shows that the supply of non-stop flights provided by...