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Regional Trade Agreements Revisited, Hui Chin Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The gravity model is a workhorse for econometric studies of the impact of regional trade agreements (RTAs). Despite its initial lack of theoretical basis, the model has been successfully derived from various trade theories. The latest theoretical derivation by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) reveals that prior gravity studies have made the critical error of omitting the multilateral resistance variable, which results in biased estimates. Other recent studies have highlighted empirical issues with the commonly used procedure of log-linearizing the gravity model and estimating the parameters using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression. Silva and Tenreyro (2006) point out that this …