This study examines the effect of regional integration-specifically, that of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as an economic integration agreement-on the survival rate of Ghana's exports. It employs a discrete-time complementary log-log hazard model with a random effects...

What determines the direction of spread of currency crises? We examine data on waves of currency crises in 1992, 1994, 1997, and 1998 to evaluate several hypotheses on the determinants of contagion. We simultaneously consider trade competition, financial links, and institutional similarity to...

We develop Bayesian techniques for estimation and model comparison in a novel Generalised Stochastic Unit Root (GSTUR) model. This allows us to investigate the presence of a deterministic time trend in economic series, while allowing the degree of persistence to change over time. In particular...

A message coming out of the recent Bayesian literature on cointegration is that it is important to elicit a prior on the space spanned by the cointegrating vectors (as opposed to a particular identified choice for these vectors). In previous work, such priors have been found to greatly...

The existing weight of evidence suggests that financial structure (the classification of a financial system as bank-based versus market-based) is irrelevant for economic growth. This contradicts the common belief that the institutional structure of a financial system matters. We re-examine this...

What determines the direction of spread of currency crises? We examine data on waves of currency crises in 1992, 1994, 1997, and 1998 to evaluate several hypotheses on the determinants of contagion. We simultaneously consider trade competition, financial links, and institutional similarity to...