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Gravity Redux: Measuring International Trade Costs with Panel Data

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TLDR
This paper derived a micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs that indirectly infers trade frictions from observable trade data and showed that this trade cost measure is consistent with a broad range of leading trade theories including Ricardian and heterogeneous firms models.
Abstract
Barriers to international trade are known to be large but due to data limitations it is hard to measure them directly for a large number of countries over many years. To address this problem I derive a micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs that indirectly infers trade frictions from observable trade data. I show that this trade cost measure is consistent with a broad range of leading trade theories including Ricardian and heterogeneous firms models. In an application I show that U.S. trade costs with major trading partners declined on average by about 40 percent between 1970 and 2000, with Mexico and Canada experiencing the biggest reductions.

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BookDOI

An Advanced Guide to Trade Policy Analysis: The Structural Gravity Model

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Book ChapterDOI

The Gravity Model in International Trade

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show how some of the issues raised by Jan Tinbergen have been the step stones of a 50-year long research agenda, and how the numerous empirical and theoretical contributions that followed dealt with old problems and highlighted new ones.
References
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Posted Content

Gravity with Gravitas: A Solution to the Border Puzzle

TL;DR: This article showed that the gravity model usually estimated does not correspond to the theory behind it and showed that national borders reduce trade between the US and Canada by about 44% while reducing trade among other industrialized countries by about 30%.
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The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity

TL;DR: In this paper, a dynamic industry model with heterogeneous firms is proposed to explain why international trade induces reallocations of resources among firms in an industry and contributes to a welfare gain.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a simple formal analysis which incorporates these elements, and show how it can be used to shed some light on some issues which cannot be handled in more conventional models.
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Export Versus FDI with Heterogeneous Firms

TL;DR: In this article, Helpman et al. introduce a simple multicountry, multisector model, in which firms face a proximity-concentration trade-off between exports and FDI.
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Technology, Geography, and Trade

TL;DR: This article developed a Ricardian trade model that incorporates realistic geographic features into general equilibrium and delivered simple structural equations for bilateral trade with parameters relating to absolute advantage, comparative advantage, and geographic barriers.
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