Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
The World Bank’s Doing Business project claims to provide “objective measures of business regulations in 190 economies”. In the trade literature, a key use of these data has been to show the impact of border delays on trade performance. We revisit previous results using a structural gravity model and panel data for 2005–2015. Although we confirm the original finding, we also show that trade times have a negative and statistically significant impact on services trade—even though services do not in reality experience border delays. The effect is due to an apparent mixing in the Doing Business data of aspects of a country’s institutional environment with information on trade times. Our results provide a caution for applied researchers, and policymakers using these data to track performance.