Professor Scott L. Baier
I am a Professor in the John E. Walker Department of Economics at Clemson University. Currently, I am also serving as the Chair of the Department. My main areas of research are international trade and economic growth. As this website evolves, it will eventually have links to current working papers, links to published papers and access to the data sets and programs.
Gravity and Gobalization with Samuel Standaert: In their 2002 paper, Lai and Trefler showed that while the gravity model can account for a large share of the cross-sectional variation of bilateral trade flows, it does a poor job of explaining how trade changes over time. In order to better account for the growth of trade, we propose an empirical specification that allows for shocks to global trade costs. While these shocks are global meaning that they affect all country pairs, the extent to they affect trade is allowed to differ for each importer-exporter combination. To estimate this model, we employ a Bayesian Gibbs sampling approach where the trade shocks are identified using state-space techniques. We find that the trade shocks show a very strong and robust pattern over time, bearing a close resemblance to shocks to total factor productivity; that is, like total factor productivity, they can be measured, but the cause and/or nature of the shock is no known. By augmenting a structural gravity model with these global trade shocks, we are able to explain roughly 60 percent of the growth of bilateral trade. Furthermore, the inclusion of trade shock
Determinants of Economic Integration Agreements with Ward Reesman. In this paper, we model and predict the decision of country pairs to enter into different trade agreements. The paper is an extension of Baier and Bergstrand (2004) but goes beyond predicting just FTAs. The objective of this paper is to better understand that the characteristics of bilateral pairs when the enter into shallow or deeper agreements.
