Currency unions, trade and heterogeneity

Natalie Chen and Dennis Novy

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: How do trade costs affect international trade? This paper offers a new approach. We rely on a flexible gravity equation that predicts variable trade cost elasticities, both across and within country pairs. We apply this framework to the effect of currency unions on international trade. While we estimate that currency unions are associated with a trade increase of around 38 percent on average, we find substantial underlying heterogeneity. Consistent with the predictions of our framework, we find effects around three times as strong for country pairs associated with small import shares, and a zero effect for large import shares. Our results imply that conventional homogeneous currency union estimates do not provide helpful guidance for countries considering to join a currency union. Instead, countries need to take into account the distribution of their trade shares to assess the impact of trade costs.

Keywords: currency unions; Euro; gravity; heterogeneity; trade costs; trade elasticity; translog (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F15 F33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-opm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/88487/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Currency unions, trade and heterogeneity (2018)
Working Paper: Currency Unions, Trade, and Heterogeneity (2018)
Working Paper: Currency Unions, Trade, and Heterogeneity (2018)
Working Paper: Currency Unions, Trade, and Heterogeneity (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:88487

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().