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Do preferential trade agreements (PTAs) lead to greater market integration, more intense competition and less market power for firms? This paper integrates the detailed data on 257 preferential trade agreements from the World Bank's Deep Trade Agreements (DTA) database with administrative customs datasets of product-level exports by firms from thirteen developing and emerging countries to estimate the responsiveness of firm-level exports, export prices, and destination-specific markups to trade and domestic policy commitments enshrined in deep trade agreements. The findings suggest that both the direct and indirect effects of deep trade agreement provisions on export sales are quantitatively significant. Perhaps more interestingly, the finding of a suggestive evidence of a pro-competitive effect of PTAs.

Competition Policy --- Competitiveness and Competition Policy --- Deep Trade Agreement --- Export Competitiveness --- Firm Level Data --- Gravity Model --- International Economics and Trade --- Markup Elasticity --- Mutual Recognition --- Private Sector Development --- Rules of Origin --- Trade and Services --- Trade Elasticity --- Trade Policy

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The majority of services trade is currently transacted under the terms of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) with increasingly ambitious provisions on crossborder trade and investment in services. This paper exploits novel and detailed information on the architecture and depth of services PTAs (the World Bank Deep Trade Agreements 2.0 database) to study which provisions, or policy configurations, characterise an effective agreement. The richness of policy information is crucial for being able to identify those aspects that matter most, namely an agreement's structure, its rules of origin for firms and natural persons, and provisions that ensure accountability. Ambitious provisions in these areas are associated with 15-65 percent higher bilateral trade, driven by regulation-intensive services. Services PTAs also lead to an increase in services value added sourced from PTA partners, through provisions that facilitate the exchange of capital and people. This finding sheds light on how services PTAs can affect the configuration of value chain trade.

Deep Trade Agreement --- International Economics and Trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Preferential Trade Agreements --- Regional Integration --- Services Investment --- Services Trade --- Trade and Regional Integration --- Trade and Services --- Trade Finance and Investment --- Trade Liberalization --- Trade Policy --- Value Added

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Modern trade agreements contain a large number of provisions in addition to tariff reductions, in areas as diverse as services trade, competition policy, trade-related investment measures, or public procurement. Existing research has struggled with overfitting and severe multicollinearity problems when trying to estimate the effects of these provisions on trade flows. Building on recent developments in the machine learning and variable selection literature, this paper proposes data-driven methods for selecting the most important provisions and quantifying their impact on trade flows, without the need of making ad hoc assumptions on how to aggregate individual provisions. The analysis finds that provisions related to antidumping, competition policy, technical barriers to trade, and trade facilitation are associated with enhancing the trade-increasing effect of trade agreements.

Deep Trade Agreement --- International Economics and Trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Lasso --- Machine Learning --- Preferential Trade Agreements --- Trade Agreements --- Trade and Regional Integration --- Trade Facilitation --- Trade Liberalization --- Trade Policy

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This paper presents new data on the content of preferential trade agreements. The data contain detailed information on the 18 policy areas most frequently covered in preferential trade agreements, focusing on the stated objectives, substantive commitments, and other aspects such as transparency, procedures, and enforcement. Several new stylized facts emerge: (i) preferential trade agreements have reduced trade-weighted average tariff rates to less than 5 percent for more than two-thirds of countries; (ii) the number of commitments in preferential trade agreements has increased over time, particularly since the 2000s and in areas aiming at facilitating flows of services, goods, and capital; (iii) deepening commitments have been accompanied by an increase in regulatory requirements, namely on enforcement; (iv) developing countries tend to have fewer commitments in preferential trade agreements, with larger gaps in areas such as labor and the environment; and (v) preferential trade agreements are more similar within blocs, but similarity can be significant even across blocs. The paper also discusses the challenges of quantification of preferential trade agreements "depth" and its effects and proposes a research agenda for future work on trade agreements.

Deep Trade Agreement --- Foreign Direct Investment --- Intellectual Property Rights --- International Economics and Trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Labor Migration --- Preferential Trade Agreements --- Trade Agreement --- Trade and Services --- Trade In Services --- Trade Integration --- Trade Liberalization --- World Trade Organization

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Deepening preferential trade agreements extend coverage to social issues, including labor clauses. While there is a long history of debate over the intent of labor clauses, less is known about the impact of labor clauses. Recent studies show that labor clauses improve working conditions, but the impact on trade flows is still debated. Existing studies do not include a full set of fixed effects (to control for endogeneity and unobserved confounding factors), other dimensions of deep agreements that could be correlated with labor clauses (tariffs and other "deep" clauses), and pseudo-Poisson maximum likelihood estimation. This paper combines all three with additional robustness checks. While the estimated effect of trade agreements is positive overall, the estimated marginal relationship between labor clauses and trade volume is generally negative but varies with the type of clauses. Freedom of Association, Forced and Child Labor, and International Labor Standards are consistently associated with higher trade flows. Clauses that are more likely to eliminate illicit trade, including clauses related to discrimination, protection of working conditions, and third-party monitoring exhibit a negative marginal relationship with trade flows.

Child Labor --- Deep Trade Agreement --- Freedom of Association --- Gravity Model --- International Economics and Trade --- International Labor Standard --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Labor and Employment Law --- Labor Clause --- Labor Law --- Labor Policies --- Labor Policy --- Labor Standards --- Law and Development --- Social Protections and Labor --- Work and Working Conditions