Latent Multilateral Trade Resistance Indices: Theory and Evidence

Abstract

Abstract Anderson and van Wincoop (American Economic Review (2003), 69:106) make a convincing argument that traditional gravity equation estimates are biased by the omission of multilateral resistance terms. They show that these multilateral resistance terms are implicitly defined by a system of non‐linear equations involving all regions' GDP shares and a global interdependence structure involving trade costs. We show how linearizing the system of non‐linear relationships around a free trade world leads to an interdependence structure that can be used as a Bayesian prior to produce statistical estimates of the inward and outward multilateral resistance indices. This reflects a statistical approach that has advantages over the non‐stochastic numerical approach used by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) to solve for these indices.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.