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Services constitute a significant part of GDP and overall trade in modern economies, but little is known about the magnitude of its obstacles. Great effort has been made to establish measures of services trade frictions on the part of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. A customary way of using these measures is to employ them in log-linear regressions to gauge their effect on services trade flows. This may be problematic to the extent that these measures do not capture ad valorem (tariff type price increasing) trade costs. Hence, it is natural to believe that available services trade cost measures may have a nonlinear impact on services trade flows. The present paper documents that this is the case, using nonparametric estimates to quantify the direct impact of important trade cost measures captured by the Services Trade Restrictiveness Index of the OECD on cross-border services transaction costs and trade., The World Economy, 45 (3), ISSN:0378-5920, ISSN:1467-9701

Customary empirical gravity models are parametric and rely on the assumption that exports from country i to j depend on an additive index of three components: i-specific supply potential which is common across importers j; j-specific demand potential which is common across exporters i; and bilateral trade frictions which are indexed by ij and common within ij in a generic period. We demonstrate that the data reject the constancy of these components within category. The variation of trade-agreement-depth effects within category across country pairs and time is striking., Economics Letters, 201, ISSN:0165-1765