The course focuses on current issues in international trade, with emphasis on applied economic research over the last twenty years. How is empirical evidence used to test (and reject) alternative theories and to motivate empirically based policy choices? The substantive questions concern the relationship between trade and development; if trade is good for development under certain conditions, what are these conditions? Has reduction of trade barriers such as tariffs eliminated the distinction between international and domestic trade, and if not what are the costs that differentiate international from domestic trade? Trade facilitation, i.e. the process of reducing these trade costs, has become a centerpiece of regional and multilateral trade negotiations; how can it best be promoted, i.e. which trade costs are most important and how responsive are they to policy change? A key ingredient for evidence-based policy formulation is to understand how evidence is obtained. The major approach in this literature over the last twenty years has been the gravity model. Four of the sessions will be devoted to the methodological issues, including computer lab time to gain hands-on experience in obtaining and interpreting econometric results.Prerequisites:International trade theory and Statistics (or passing the equivalent waiver exams)