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Robust Determinants Of Bilateral Trade, Marianne Baxter, Jonathan Hersh
Robust Determinants Of Bilateral Trade, Marianne Baxter, Jonathan Hersh
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
What are the policies and country-level conditions which best explain bilateral trade flows between countries? As databases expand, an increasing number of possible explanatory variables are proposed that influence bilateral trade without a clear indication of which variables are robustly important across contexts, time periods, and which are not sensitive to inclusion of other control variables. To shed light on this problem, we apply three model selection methods – Lasso reguarlized regression, Bayesian Model Averaging, and Extreme Bound Analysis -- to candidate variables in a gravity models of trade. Using a panel of 198 countries covering the years 1970 to …
Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods And The Welfare Gains From Trade After 1492, Jonathan Hersh, Hans-Joachim Voth
Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods And The Welfare Gains From Trade After 1492, Jonathan Hersh, Hans-Joachim Voth
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
When did overseas trade start to matter for living standards? Traditional real-wage indices suggest that living standards in Europe stagnated before 1800. In this paper, we argue that welfare rose substantially, but surreptitiously, because of an influx of new goods as a result of overseas trade. Colonial luxuries such as tea, coffee, and sugar transformed European diets after the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These goods became household items in many countries by the end of the 18th century. We use three different methods to calculate welfare gains based on price data and …