摘要：The objective of this study is to measure trade costs incurred by major U.S. regions when trading manufactured food products with other countries. Trade costs in this study’s context refer to all factors limiting exchange of goods and services among countries, e.g. policy, geographic and institutional barriers. Such costs are often measured as frictions in a micro-founded gravity model as in Anderson and van Wincoop (2004) and Jacks et al. (2011). In this study, the gravity framework is extended to identify regional trade costs in the U.S. food manufacturing industry. The new measures of trade costs not only capture the variation over time in trade fictions among countries, but also allow for further examination of their underlying sources: policy, geographic and institutional factors.
