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Betting on shipping
The Economist has a story on container derivatives: Some 140m containers now carry around half of the world’s exports by value. And according to the brokers that are starting to offer container-freight...
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The shortcomings of African ports
Michael Baker in Foreign Affairs on African maritime problems: Africa has the least efficient ports in the world. Dwell times — the amount of time a ship must stay in port — for the loading and...
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Playing with shipping costs data
Ethan Zuckerman has some fun with Maersk’s online shipping rates calculator: The main thing I’ve found playing with Maersk’s calendar: distance doesn’t matter as much as demand. Americans buy a lot of...
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A non-linear revisiting of Rose (2004)
Pao-Li Chang and Myoung-Jae Lee look at the WTO’s impact on trade flows without assuming linear functional forms for trade frictions. This is forthcoming in the JIE: This paper re-examines the GATT/WTO...
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The Panama Canal expansion
The Panama Canal is being expanded; the $5b construction of larger locks is due to be completed in 2014. As the Financial Times describes, that’s expected to shake up the east coast shipping scene....
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Lessons on trade finance
A summary of a survey from the World Bank: “Trade Finance during the 2008–9 Trade Collapse: Key Takeaways“
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Peru’s “Easy Export” program
Here’s how the World Development Report 2009 summarized a Peruvian trade-facilitation project: BOX 8.9 Exporting by mail in Peru—connecting small producers to markets In many countries small...
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Can the Port of Long Beach compete with the Panama Canal?
An update on the Panama Canal expansion from the Economist that focuses on the west coast’s reaction: But what can the California ports do? Floating cargo from Asia to the east coast by boat will...
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Don’t go to Shanghai for your Big Mac
Richard Florida says “While it’s commonly thought that globalization has put the world’s global cities on an increasingly level playing field, substantial differences in prices persist”: What should...
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Atkin & Donaldson – Who’s Getting Globalized? The Size and Nature of...
David Atkin and Dave Donaldson are presenting this paper tomorrow afternoon at the NBER summer institute: This paper uses a newly collected dataset on the prices of narrowly defined goods across many...
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AFT on Railroads of the Raj
A Fine Theorem has a nice write-up of Dave Donaldson’s Railroads of the Raj. He’s put in more effort than I did when writing it up in 2009.
View ArticleWhat economic activities are “tradable”?
I’ve had a couple conversations with graduate students in recent months about classifying industries or occupations by their tradability, so here’s a blog post reviewing some of the relevant...
View ArticleWhat’s an “iceberg commuting cost”?
In the recent quantitative spatial economics literature, the phrase “iceberg commuting cost” appears somewhat often. The phrase primarily appears in papers coauthored by Stephen Redding (ARSW 2015, RR...
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Do customs duties compound non-tariff trade costs? Not in the US
For mathematical convenience, economists often assume iceberg trade costs when doing quantitative work. When tackling questions of trade policy, analysts must distinguish trade costs from import taxes....
View ArticleThought experiments that exact hat algebra can and cannot compute
Among other things, I’m teaching the Eaton-Kortum (2002) model and “exact hat algebra” to my PhD class tomorrow. Last year, my slides said “this model’s counterfactual predictions can be obtained...
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