Biography

João Oliveira is a PhD student in Economics at Leibniz University Hannover and currently a visiting researcher at the University of Minho. His research focuses on international trade, with a particular interest in how cross-border policies, institutions, and market structure shape trade flows, prices, and firm behaviour. His current work studies international cartels and their effects on global trade patterns using matched cartel and bilateral trade data.

Abstract

International cartels are usually studied through their effects on prices and market power, but their implications for trade patterns are less well understood. This project studies how international cartel activity is associated with changes in bilateral trade flows, quantities, and unit values. I combine data on private international cartels with BACI bilateral trade data at the product-country-pair-year level, constructing several measures of cartel exposure based on whether importers, exporters, or both sides of a trade flow are linked to cartel jurisdictions or cartel firm countries. Preliminary results suggest that cartel-linked trade is not captured by a single margin: in some specifications, cartel links are associated with lower quantities and higher unit values, with evidence of product-level and regional heterogeneity. The presentation will focus on the data matching process, the empirical design, and the interpretation of the current evidence, while also discussing limitations related to estimation with very large bilateral panels.

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