What determines sovereign risk? We study the London bond market from the 1870s to the 1930s. Our findings support conventional wisdom concerning the low credibility of the interwar gold standard. Before 1914 gold standard adherence effectively signalled credibility and shaved up to 30 basis...

In recent years free movement of financial capital following financial liberalization has given the impression that financial markets are truly globalized. In this paper we argue that free movement of financial capital alone does not constitute financial globalization. To achieve true financial...

If, in international agreements, governments “link'' trade to environmental policy (or other issues with non-pecuniary externalities), will this promote more cooperation in both policies or will cooperation in one policy be strengthened at the expense of the other? We analyze this question in...

Increasingly, in regional agreements, large economies, e.g. U.S. and E.U., offer lower trade barriers in exchange for cooperation by small economies in environmental, intellectual property and other issues. What is the effect of such agreements on multilateral trade liberalization? We show that,...

In this paper we extend the macroeconometric model developed in Bagnai (2004) by linking it to a submodel for the Japanese economy, and we utilize this extended model to investigate several hypotheses of reduction in the US twin deficits. The Japanese submodel is specified and estimated along...

Most Favored Nation (MFN) status, trade embargoes and blockades have traditionally been used to entice nations to alter their behavior or to punish them for certain behavior. The intentions behind these policies are generally noble, at least on the surface. However, instituting these policies...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU’s monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

The US current account deficit has been persistently large and has brought the country's ratio of foreign debt to GDP to 20%, a figure that is high by historical standards. This paper argues that while US solvency is not a near-term constraint on ongoing deficits, the sheer size of the US...

Inward FDI in developing Mediterranean countries is supposedly expected to soar as a result of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EURO-MED) between the European Union and twelve Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries that emerged from the 1995 Barcelona Conference. This is especially true...

The central claim in this paper is that by explicitly introducing costs of international trade (narrowly, transport costs but more broadly, tariffs, nontariff barriers and other trade costs), one can go far toward explaining a great number of the main empirical puzzles that international...