The Trans-Pacific Partnership has renewed interest in understanding the impact of trade agreements. This column employs a new approach – synthetic controls– to understand the impact of past trade agreements. The results show that trade agreements can generate substantial gains: on average, an increase of exports by 80 percentage points over ten years. The export gains are higher when emerging markets have trade agreements with advanced markets. Interestingly, all the countries in NAFTA have gained substantially due to the agreement.