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This study presents evidence of increasing regionalization of international trade among 10 South American countries from 1980 to 2001. Regionalization of trade in South America is best described as an increasing trade among Spanish-speaking countries and increasing trade within the two regional agreements, the Andean Community and Mercosur. There is also evidence of border erosion in the continent, especially among the Mercosur members. These results emerge from a simple statistical analysis and are also economically significant when tested in a consistent gravity equation that controls for a set of macroeconomic and geographic variables.

Can changes in the trade of the world's largest trading countries be considered more global? Or should they be labeled as more regional? We investigated these questions for the G7 countries for the time period from 1980 to 1997. We found that the usual dichotomy of global–regional is not rich enough to answer these questions because globalization can be measured in terms of both physical and cultural distance. Our new taxonomy allows for testing these separate impacts on world trade and suggests that trade changes are best described as regional, though with some qualification. With respect to physical distance, we find that trade is clearly becoming more regional. On the cultural dimension, however, we find conflicting results. These results are robust to a series of tests. We find the same pattern at industry level, except for paper products and motor vehicles. The regionalization pattern holds for both imports to and exports from the G7, but it is stronger for exports.

Virtually all parents want their children to succeed academically. How to achieve this goal, though, is far from clear. Specifically, the temporal spacing between adjacent births has been shown to affect educational outcomes. While many of these studies have produced substantial and statistically significant results, these results have been relatively narrow in their application due to data limitations. Using Colorado birth certificates matched to schooling outcomes, we investigate the relationship between birth spacing and educational attainment. We instrument birth spacing with a previous pregnancy that did not result in a live birth. We find no overall effect of spacing on either the first or second children’s grade 3–10 test scores. Stratifying by the sexes of the children, we find that when the first child is a boy and the second a girl, an extra year of spacing increases the first child’s math, reading, and writing test scores by 0.07–0.08 SD, while there is no impact on the second child. This is the first study to do such an analysis using matched large-scale birth and elementary to high school administrative data, and to leverage a very large dataset to stratify our results by the sexes of the children.

Two fundamental reasons that account for the domestic bias of consumption are distance and borders. Distance proxies for unobservable trading costs, which include, among other things, transport and administrative costs. Distance is a powerful deterrent to international trade. This fact is illustrated by considering the situation of Bahrain and Qatar, Belgium and India, and Indonesia and Guyana, which are, respectively, the closest (55.5mi), the median (4,414.7mi), and the farthest (12,351.1mi) country pairs in a large sample of bilateral trade flows (see Chapter 2). For Bahrain and Qatar, distance is estimated to reduce the estimate of bilateral trade flows by 39%; for Belgium and India, the reduction is 58%; for Indonesia and Guyana, the reduction is 121% (it exceeds the value of bilateral transactions). The success of the gravity model in explaining bilateral trade flows is due, to no small measure, to distance. For example, the standard trade model of complete specialization, without trading costs, makes two strong predictions. The first is that a country will import goods from all other countries in the world and the second that bilateral trade flows are proportional to the income of the two countries. Both predictions are way off the mark. Countries import from a small fraction of the potential pool of exporters and incomes alone over-predict actual trade flows by a large margin.

Taking as reference a sample of around a hundred biographical materials on entrepreneurs in Mexico and Colombia, the purpose of this chapter is dual. Both to show the relevance and varied modalities that the biographical approach has enjoyed in business history research since the 1990s, and to display the intrinsic potential this modality of scholarship entails for entrepreneurship endeavors. In particular, it discusses the prospects to incorporate this body of empirical works into the large Latin American audience attending undergraduate, graduate and executive education programs in business, economic history and related fields. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first two are devoted to illustrate relevant patterns in the entrepreneurial trajectory of individuals and entrepreneurial families studied in each of the two countries under consideration. The last section identifies some conceptual issues that may impact current debates on Latin American business development as exemplified in recent business and economic history journal venues and scholarly conferences.