1. Sterling Bills Market and International Trade

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of countries’ access to the London bill market on bilateral trade flows during the first wave of globalisation. The channel explored stresses how financial intermediaries alleviated exporter’s barrier to trade by providing working capital and insuring against export risks. Using an augmented gravity model, I test this channel by assessing whether countries’ access to the London bill market impacted positively their bilateral trade. To do so, I constructed a unique granular dataset, comprising 27.064 sterling bills of exchange for the year 1878 for which I added Accominotti et al. (2021)’s data for the period 1906. I identify, for each country-pair, the number of firms having access to the London bill market, and I evaluate its impact on bilateral trade flows. While a significant effect is demonstrated for the year 1878, my results highlight a sharp decrease between both years. This can be explained by the extensive and intensive margin effect of bill market access on trade. While, during the first years of globalisation, the access of new drawers to the London bill market highly impacted trade as the financial structure was in expansion, once this financial structure was established, trade was affected overall by the intensive part. A second factor lies in the growing importance of finance bills in the market. Differentiating by type of acceptors, I showcase that these results remain similar regardless of the intermediary type (i.e., financial or non-financial firm), despite their apparent diverging market structure.

2. Gold and Trade: An empirical simulation approach (with Rui Esteves and Florian Ploeckl)

Abstract: This paper examines the rise of the classical gold standard by studying the reciprocal relation between trade and monetary regimes from the 1860s to World War I. Existing gravity estimates cannot identify this relation cleanly because trade and regime choice are jointly endogenous and bilateral trade depends on wider network structure, even after standard corrections. Using a dynamic social network model, we show that trade networks strongly shaped monetary choices: countries tended to adopt the regimes of their main trading partners. By contrast, it finds little support for the classic gravity-model claim that shared regimes substantially increased trade.

3. Trade that ties: Trade communities over two centuries (1833-2025) (with Guillaume Daudin, Béatrice Dedinger and Paul Girard)

Abstract: The share of country pairs that trade with each other has risen steadily since the early nineteenth century: globalization is as much about the formation of new trade links as about larger flows of existing ones. We argue that a key force in driving extensive-margin expansion is the structure of pre-existing trade relations. To study it, we build the most comprehensive network of bilateral trade between polities (sovereign countries and colonies) to date, covering 1833-2025. For the pre-1947 period we combine the RICardo trade data with the GeoPolHist polity data, and we use a gravity-based allocation procedure, incorporating distance and geopolitical ties (conflict, empire, alliance), to assign trade flows reported between groups of polities to individual pairs. We detect trade communities in this network with the Louvain algorithm every year. Two polities belong to the same community if they trade intensely or, more originally, if they trade intensely with the same partners. As a result, communities may capture shared business and financial networks even absent direct trade. Finally, we estimate a gravity model of the probability that a new bilateral link forms, controlling for distance and geopolitical factors. We test whether belonging to the same community raises this probability, consistent with shared information and intermediaries lowering the fixed cost of starting to trade. If this holds, trade communities are a new and important driver of the extensive margin of globalization.

4. Foreign banks’ competition in Asia in the age of imperialism: A network analysis (with Stefano Battilossi, Aditi Dixit and Florian Ploeckl)

Abstract: This paper studies foreign banks’ competition in geopolitically fragmented Asia before 1914. For that purpose, we assembled from primary sources a unique and original dataset of Asian branches and other characteristics (equity capital, total assets, total branches) for 42 banks from 9 origin countries (European powers, the US and Japan) at three benchmark years: 1886, 1900 and 1913. We also compiled information (geographical coordinates, population, trade volume, telegraph connections, geopolitical characteristics) for 350 locations in 30 Asian polities over the same period. For our empirical analysis, we model the bank-location matrix as a bipartite network and use a Stochastic Actor-Oriented Model to simulate banks’ entry/exit decisions based on bank and location characteristics and a variety of network effects. The results highlight the importance of factors such as the size of local markets, connections to global information networks, geopolitical effects, imitation of competitors’ branch networks and the intensity of local competition.

1. Ghallada, Y., Girard, A. & Oosterlinck, K. (2021). "Crises, credit booms and monetary regime", Economics Bulletin 41(3), 1431-1443.  Published version

Abstract: In theory credit booms, and the crises associated to these booms, should occur more frequently in Fiat monetary regimes than in regimes, such as the Gold Standard, where money creation is constrained. In this note, we investigate whether the importance of the credit boom factor, as an early warning indicator (EWI) of systemic financial crises, varies across monetary regimes for a sample of 17 developed countries over the 1870-2016 period. We find no evidence of a difference between monetary regime for credit-driven crises and this both for the occurrence and the severity of crises.