ABSTRACT
This is somewhat of a detective story. The subject of the inquiry is a set of findings about bilateral trade flows (Frankel, Stein and Wei, 1994a and 1994b) which, although implausible a priori, show up as highly significant statistically. These findings are almost certainly wrong; but it takes the combination of some obscure clues from a 30-year-old Dutch doctoral dissertation (Linnemann, 1966) to provide the necessary evidence.
