We look at the effect of the WTO on stabilizing international trade using both a fixed-effects and an event study approach. Our results show that WTO members experience lower trade volatilties in a predictable and integrated system. In addition, we focus on the trade volatility comovement among countries in a multilateral framework. Previous research has mainly focused on WTO membership in a bilateral trade framework, which only allows interactions between two trade partners without considering any possible influence from other countries. A bilateral trade framework does not fully capture the effect of WTO membership, nor does it investigate why the multilateral platform of the WTO should exist. With a unique setup estimating interactions among multiple trading dyads, we find strong evidence supporting positive correlation or comovement of trade volatilities across trading pairs. Such a comovement appears much stronger among WTO members than between WTO and non-WTO members. Due to the feedback mechanism among dyads in a multilateral framework, such as the WTO, bilateral trade stability may further stabilize the global trade. Our results remain robust to a battery of sensitivity checks.

中文翻译：

---

WTO多边主义在国际贸易稳定中的作用

我们使用固定效应和事件研究方法来研究 WTO 对稳定国际贸易的影响。我们的研究结果表明，WTO 成员在可预测的综合系统中经历了较低的贸易波动。此外，我们关注多边框架下国家之间的贸易波动联动。以前的研究主要集中在双边贸易框架中的WTO成员资格，该框架只允许两个贸易伙伴之间的互动，而没有考虑其他国家的任何可能影响。双边贸易框架并没有充分体现 WTO 成员资格的影响，也没有调查为什么要存在 WTO 的多边平台。通过独特的设置估计多个交易对之间的交互，我们发现强有力的证据支持跨交易对的贸易波动正相关或联动。这种联动在 WTO 成员之间似乎比在 WTO 和非 WTO 成员之间强得多。由于在WTO等多边框架内的对偶反馈机制，双边贸易稳定可能会进一步稳定全球贸易。对于一系列敏感性检查，我们的结果仍然稳健。