Gains from trade and the sovereign bond market

Increasing international flows of goods, services, and financial assets have been shown to increase a country's welfare through various channels. This paper studies how a country's access to a bond market affects its welfare gains from international trade. We do so by incorporating a sovereign bond market into a simple Armington (1969)’s trade model. While standard trade models suggest surprisingly small gains from trade, our model implies that introducing channels through a sovereign bond market greatly magnifies the gains from trade. Key mechanisms in the model are confirmed by data and the results are found to be robust to a variety of considerations.