iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all the faculty members in the department for being patient with me and working hard to help me improve and mature. Specifically I would like to thank Craig Wells, who helped me with most of my projects and always gave encouraging words. Finally, I would like to thank the people at both HP and Excelsior College for their contributions to this work. Witho...

This paper formulates an empirical model to estimate the impact of endogenous new regional trade agreement (RTA) membership on trade structure. The likelihood of new RTA membership is influenced by economic fundamentals such as country size, factor endowments, and trade and investment costs. In a sample of country-pairs covering mainly the OECD economies we find a particularly strong effect of ...

The objective of this paper is to explore the effect of financial crisis on trade flows of steel industries in the major Asian-Pacific steel producing countries. Using a static and dynamic panel data analysis, we test the hypothesis that the global financial crisis has a negative effect on Asia-Pacific bilateral steel trade flows. We also examine the role of regional trade integration in bilate...

Previous theoretical contributions on endogenous tariff formation have focused on trade models with homogeneous goods and constant returns to scale. This paper investigates the political equilibrium of trade policy when economic structure is instead characterized by differentiated products and increasing returns to scale and there exists intra-industry trade. The result shows that endogenous ta...

this paper is analysing the role of economic reforms on the labour market in iranian industry in economic reform period (1990-2005), and in turn, it is comparing it with closed economic period (1979-1989). in order to do the above comparative analysis, the manufacturing industry has been categorized based on hecksher-ohlin and gause methodology. accordingly, we have some industrial groups, incl...