This paper proposes to reexamine the GATT/WTO membership effect on bilateral trade flows, using nonparametric methods including pair-matching, permutation tests, and a Rosenbaum (2002) sensitivity analysis. Taken together in a coherent manner, these methods provide an estimation framework that is robust to misspecification biases, allows general forms of heterogeneous treatment effects, and add...

this paper analyses the impact of sanctions against iran in addition to other country-specific determinants on intra-industry trade between iran and shanghai cooperation organization (sco) countries over the period 1997-2013. by disentangling total intra-industry trade (iit) into horizontal and vertical iit and after investigating bilateral trade pattern between iran and sco countries, determin...

This paper provides empirical evidence for the interaction between firm-level total factor productivity and trade liberalization as key determinants of firm-level job destruction caused by trade. We also test some key theoretical predictions from Melitz (2003), whose model is used to derive an explicit equation relating firm productivity and trade-induced labor layoff when a country liberalizes...

This paper documents patterns in international trade costs in processed foods for a large cross-section of developing and developed countries, during the 1976-2000 period. A trade costs index is inferred from a micro-founded gravity equation that incorporates bilateral ‘iceberg’ trade costs. For 2000, the weighted average tariff equivalent of trade costs ranges from 73% for the North to 134% fo...

This paper examines the empirical relationship between trade and total factor productivity (TFP) in South Africa. Using data on actual trade protection across different manufacturing sectors, it is shown that trade liberalization had a positive impact on TFP growth during the 1990s. In addition, time-series evidence on macro data supports a positive long-run relationship between TFP and opennes...

This paper investigates empirically how similarity of demand structures – approximated by similarity of income distributions – affects trade patterns along both the extensive and intensive margin. The idea that similarity of demand structures intensifies trade goes back to the well-known Linder hypothesis. Based on a sample of 102 countries, I find that bilateral trade volumes are increasing in...

the role of distance as border effects between trade partners has been created challengeable discussions in gravity model literature for international economists and lead to different theoretical aspects for measuring and modeling of it in recent years. moreover, the necessity of non-linear method for estimation of gravity model has been perfectly agreed. the importance of this study is the est...

This paper investigates whether differences across countries in overall country-specific trade costs affect comparative advantage. It does so by examining whether the commodity composition of countries’ trade is driven by differences in countries’ trade costs, as well as by differences in traditional factor endowments. Industry export shares across up to 71 countries and 158 manufacturing indus...

When countries change most favored nation (MFN) tariffs, partners that trade on MFN terms experience plausibly exogenous tariff changes. Using this variation, we estimate the elasticity at short and long horizons with local projections. We find of tariff-exclusive flows is ?0.76 in run, approximately ?2 run. Our long-run estimates are smaller than typical literature, it takes 7 to10 years to co...