TY  - JOUR
AU  - Abrego,Lisandro
AU  - Riezman,Raymond
AU  - Whalley,John
TI  - How Often Are Propositions on the Effects of Customs Unions Theoretical Curiosa and When Should They Guide Policy?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8304
PY  - 2001
Y2  - May 2001
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8304
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8304.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Raymond G.. Riezman
Department of Economics  
Henry B. Tippie College of Business
W360 PBB  
University of Iowa 
Iowa City, IA 52242-1000 
E-Mail: raymond-riezman@uiowa.edu

John Whalley
Department of Economics
Social Science Centre
University of Western Ontario
London, ON N6A 5C2
CANADA
Tel: 519/661-3509
Fax: 519/661-3666
E-Mail: jwhalley@uwo.ca
AB  - This paper uses computational techniques to assess whether or not various propositions that have been advanced as plausible in the literature on Customs Unions (or other regional trade agreements) may actually hold. The idea is to make probabilistic statements as to whether propositions of interest might hold, rather than to restrict assumptions so they unambiguously hold. Our aim is to blend theory and numerical simulation and go beyond the ambiguous analytically derived propositions that dominate the theoretical literature so as to assess the likelihood of propositions holding for particular model specifications.
ER  -