Thirty years have passed since a small group of theorists began applying concepts and tools from industrial organization to the analysis of international trade. The new models of trade that emerged from that work didn’t supplant traditional trade theory so much as supplement it, creating an integrated view that made sense of aspects of world trade that had previously posed major puzzles. The “n...

Technical progress can be expected to reduce transport costs over time, yet most studies of bilateral trade based on the gravity model find distance effects to be increasing rather than decreasing. We investigate countries’ openness to international trade (the ratio of exports plus imports to GDP). We find that trade decreases with geographical remoteness, land area, and lack of access to the s...

We examine a standard, gravity model of international commerce, augmented to include political as well as institutional influences on bilateral trade. Using annual data from 1980-2001, we estimate regression coefficients and residual dependencies using a hierarchy of models in each year. Rather than gauge the generalizability of these patterns via traditional measures of statistical significanc...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences present a challenge to standard trade models and shows how recent “heterogeneous-firm” models of int...

This paper focuses on the spatial price discrimination in an international context, i.e. the impact of distance on fob prices set by exporting firms. The theoretical part of this paper points out the importance of the trade cost formulation on the pricing policy adopted by the firms. The empirical part shows that French firms adopt a reverse dumping strategy. In other word, firms increases thei...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on firm heterogeneity in international trade. A first wave of empirical findings from micro data on plants and firms proposed challenges for existing models of international trade and inspired the development of new theories emphasizing firm heterogeneity. Subsequent empirical research has examined additional predictions of these theories and explored o...

Recent models of international trade have identified product quality as an important determinant of bilateral trade flows. Yet relatively little is understood about the relationship between the characteristics of the export market and the quality of products. In this paper we examine this link using Chinese data. We find evidence that product unit values vary with standard gravity variables in ...

The pursuit of sustainable development requires balancing the objectives of FDI, Trade, economic growth and environmental protection. Achieving a balance between these often-conflicting priorities is difficult enough at the national level, where competing interests are at least grounded in a common environmental, social and economic context. At the international level, where different countries...

The prospects for cooperation on climate protection beyond 2012 are currently uncertain. Thus policy instruments which foster participation in International Environmental Agreements (IEA) are in demand. Among the instruments under discussion are trade sanctions. Multi-region optimal growth models are a state of the art tool for integrated assessment, but introducing trade sanctions distorts the...

 International trade causes that markets to become more competitive and small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) learn to compete effectively within this increasingly competitive global market place. SMEs are able to take advantage of increased opportunities in domestic markets that follow from international trade. It is indeed a way for internationalization of SMEs. This paper analyzes income and...