Does Bilateral Trust Affect International Movement of Goods and Labor?

Eva Spring and Volker Grossmann

VfS Annual Conference 2013 (Duesseldorf): Competition Policy and Regulation in a Global Economic Order from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Trust in the citizens of a potential partner country may affect the decision to trade with or to migrate to a foreign country. This paper employs panel data to examine the causal impact of such bilateral trust on international trade and migration patterns. We apply instrumental variables (IV) approaches that capture the exogenous variance of bilateral trust separately with various indicators of genetic ("somatic") distance between country-pairs. These indicators work equally well at the first stage. However, second-stage results very much depend on the exact measure employed as instrument. We conclude that there is little evidence that bilateral trust affects international movements of goods and labor. Moreover, we highlight the potential fragility of IV estimations even when the instruments seem plausible on theoretical grounds and when standard statistical tests confirm their validity.

JEL-codes: F10 F22 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-mig and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Does Bilateral Trust Affect International Movement of Goods and Labor (2013)
Working Paper: Does Bilateral Trust Affect International Movement of Goods and Labor? (2013)
Working Paper: Does Bilateral Trust Affect International Movement of Goods and Labor? (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc13:79956

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