Trade in business services has been attracting attention from academic researchers, policy makers, and business journalists. While there are many anecdotes, there has been little in the way of formal theory applied to this issue. In this paper, we adapt a general model of fragmentation of...

This paper examines the impact of policy-makers' horizons on the sustainability of international cooperation. We describe a prisoners' dilemma game between two infinitely-lived organizations (countries) run by agents (policy-makers) with a shorter tenure. The agents' mandates are finite but...

Economic integration, from the European Payments Union and the European Coal and Steel Community to the Common Market, the European Monetary System, the Single Market, and the euro, is one of the most visible, controversial and commented-upon aspects of Europe’s development since the end of...

Bilateral, product-level data exhibit a number of strong patterns that can be used to evaluate international trade theories, notably the spatial incidence of "export zeros" (correlated with distance and importer size), and of export unit values (positively related to distance). We show that...

The paper uses long-run GDP data for developed countries drawn from Maddison (2003) to generate deviation cycles for the period from 1870 to 2001. The cyclical deviates are examined for their bilateral cross-correlation values in three separate periods, those of the first globalization wave...

This paper reviews the problems that must be resolved at the Intergovernmental Conference in 1996 to clear the way for European Monetary Union: locking in Germany's commitment to the project, and reconciling EMU with variable geometry. It reviews what we know about the costs and benefits of EMU...

We ask whether Poland is at risk of the boom-bust problem that has afflicted economies around the time of euro adoption. Our answer, inevitably, is mixed. On the one hand the fact that Poland is an outlier, credit-growth wise, accentuates the danger of a boom if one believes in mean reversion....

In this paper we analyse the recent efforts of the international financial institutions to limit the moral hazard created by their assistance to crisis countries. We question the wisdom of the case-by-case approach taken in Pakistan, Ecuador, Romania and Ukraine. We show that because default and...

We develop a dynamic politico-economic theory of welfare state, featuring three groups of voters: skilled workers, unskilled workers, and old retirees. The welfare-state is modeled by a proportional tax on labor income to finance a demogrant in a balanced-budget manner to capture the essence of...

We survey three distinct types of financial crises which took place in the 1990s and the 2000s: 1) The credit implosion leading to severe banking crisis in Japan; 2) The foreign reserves’ meltdown triggered by foreign hot money flight from frothy economies with fixed exchange rate regimes of...