Oil Prices, Geography and Endogenous Regionalism: Too Much Ado About (Almost) Nothing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper studies the effect of oil prices on the geography of international trade. We model transport costs as a function of variable and fixed costs. By affecting the first cost component, oil prices can then modify the structure of transportation costs across partners. This, we argue, acts as a factor of distortion in relative prices, thereby creating a reallocation of trade at the expense of remote countries. In that respect, an increase in oil prices should favor regionalism. This mechanism is empirically tested using data on US bilateral imports and transportation costs. The empirical results are consistent with the theoretical intuition. But, the elasticity of freight rates to oil prices, directly linked to geographical distance, appears to be low: between 0.088 for close to US countries and 0.103 for faraway ones. We then estimate the contribution of the dramatic increase in oil prices, in recent years, to relative changes in the countries' probability to export to the US (extensive margins) along with their relative market shares (intensive margins). We find that the recent oil price increases that took place after 1999 have had only a maigre contribution: the last oil shock had contributed marginally to increase Canada and Mexico's relative performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".