One of the best established empirical results in international economics is that bilateral trade decreases with distance. Although well-known, this result has not been systematically analyzed before. We examine 1467 distance effects estimated in 103 papers. Information collected on each estimate allows us to test hypotheses about the causes of variation in the estimates. Our most interesting fi...

Gravity equations have been widely used to infer trade  ow effects of various institutional arrangements. We show that estimated gravity equations do not have a theoretical foundation. This implies both that estimation suffers from omitted variables bias and that comparative statics analysis is unfounded. We develop a method that (i) consistently and efŽ ciently estimates a theoretical gravity...

Escherichia coli O26:H11 strains were able to outgrow O157:H7 companion strains in planktonic and biofilm phases and also to effectively compete with precolonized O157:H7 cells to establish themselves in mixed biofilms. E. coli O157:H7 strains were unable to displace preformed O26:H11 biofilms. Therefore, E. coli O26:H11 remains a potential risk in food safety.

This paper provides some new empirical perspectives on the relationship between international trade and macroeconomic fluctuations in industrial economies. First, a comprehensive set of stylized facts concerning fluctuations in trade variables and their determinants is presented. A measure of the quantitative importance of international trade for the propagation of domestic business cycles is t...

Gravity Equations are broadly used to estimate the impacts of trade impediments on trade flows. It is often stated that results are implausibly high. In theoretical foundations of the gravity equation, trade costs usually enter as "icebergmelting-costs". This paper offers an alternative approach to model trade costs. From a microeconomic point of view, trade costs should depend on trade input p...

Using annual bilateral data over the period 1988-2011 for a panel of 24 industrialised and emerging economies, we analyse in a time-varying framework the determinants of output synchronisation in EMU (European Monetary Union) distinguishing between core and peripheral member states. The results support the specialisation paradigm rather than the endogeneity hypothesis. Evidence is found in the ...

This paper identifies a flaw in the infant industry argument that previous literature has ignored. A simple model first replicates the infant industry logic but subsequently shows that, in the presence of a ‘traditional technology’ with poor growth potential, the infant-industry logic is likely to fail. Under protectionism domestic producers substitute advanced technologies with the low-growth ...

The paper estimates an empirical relation based on Krugman’s “technological gap” model to explore the influence of the pattern of international trade and production on the overall productivity growth of a developing country. A key result is that increased import competition in medium-growth (but not in lowor highgrowth) manufacturing sectors enhances overall productivity growth. The authors als...

The rise of Western Europe after 1500 is due largely to growth in countries with access to the Atlantic Ocean and with substantial trade with the New World, Africa, and Asia via the Atlantic. This trade and the associated colonialism affected Europe not only directly, but also indirectly by inducing institutional change. Where “initial” political institutions (those established before 1500) pla...

In a two-country infinite-horizon model, with two traded goods and two factors of production and no international borrowing and lending, there is no convergence of incomes if there is factor-price equalization. With factor-price equalization, the Euler equations of the two economies become identical. I show that in such a set-up if agents have a non-zero probability of death, then we do get con...