Countries select particular exchange rate arrangements for a variety of reasons. For example, the ability to conduct an independent monetary policy is often cited as the main advantage of having a floating exchange rate regime. Conversely, countries sometimes tie their exchange rate to that of a larger country—foregoing the ability to conduct independent monetary policies—to benefit from the re...

How do changes in competitive intensity affect trade and spatial market share patterns in oligopolies? Models of collusive arrangements in spatially separated markets generate testable predictions of the effects of collusion on price, trade patterns and concentration. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment associated with increased anti-trust enforcement activity over the last two decades to tes...

The Asia Pacific region, and especially East Asia, has experienced rapid economic integration without the ‘hard politics’ of legally binding economic and political treaties, unlike Europe where integration has been institution-led. The ‘soft politics’ and market-led integration in East Asia set against a background of political tensions and rivalries in key relationships in the region. The pape...

Using confidential firm level data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on activities of U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) and their Canadian affiliates, we study the dramatic growth of intra-firm and arms-length U.S.-Canada trade over the 1984-1995 period. We find that the increase in trade occurred almost entirely on the intensive rather than the extensive margin. That is, MNC pare...

This paper examines various implications of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs), namely Customs Unions (CUs) and Free Trade Areas (FTAs), in the context of a multi-country general equilibrium model based on comparative advantage considerations. We calibrate the model to represent countries with symmetric endowments, and compare the impact of those agreements with free trade and a non-cooperati...

The Indian Ocean Region (IOR) has become one of the main economic forces globally, and countries within IOR have attempted to promote their intra-regional trade. This study investigates spatiotemporal evolution community structures trade impact determinant factors on formation from 1996 2017 using methods social network analysis. Trade communities are groups with measurably denser intra-trade t...

This paper studies the political viability of free trade agreements (FTAs). The key element of the analysis is the “rent dissipation” that these arrangements induce: by eliminating intra-bloc trade barriers, an FTA lowers the incentives of the local firms to lobby for higher external tariffs, thereby causing a reduction of the rents created in the lobbying process. The prospect of rent dissipat...

Although there is evidence that domestic politics matter for the formation of preferential trade agreements, the impact of large-scale changes in political institutions, especially in the direction of democratization, on economic integration has been given surprisingly short shrift in the previous literature. This study takes a first step toward developing such an explanation. It posits that, a...