Japan and India signed the much-awaited Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) on 16th February 2011. The CEPA will eliminate tariff on goods that account for 94% of their two way trade over ten years and will boost bilateral trade and investment. Indian exports which were subject...

In the Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz model of capital accumulation and resource depletion we show the following equivalence: If an efficient path has constant (gross and net of population growth) savings rates, then population growth must be quasi-arithmetic and the path is a maximin or a...

Much has been written about 19th century African American and white statures and body mass index values. However, little is known about their physical activity and calories required to sustain height and weight. This paper considers two alternative measures for biological conditions that address...

This analysis employs cointegration methods and semiparametric regression in order to assess the integration of maize markets and the factors determining national and cross-national transmission of price signals in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use a rich dataset of 16 series of wholesale maize prices...

The target zone model of Krugman (1991) has failed empirically. In this paper, we develop a model of the exchange rate with heterogeneous agents in a free floating and a target zone regime. We show that this simple model mimics the empirical puzzles of exchange rates: excessive volatility, fat...

This paper explores theoretically and empirically the long run relation of the terms of trade (ratio of domestic and foreign prices of traded manufacturing goods) and economic growth of a pair of industrialized countries, one of which experiences a major catch-up process towards the other. It is...

Few papers have tried to project how Chinese monetary policy will behave under flexible exchange rates. As Japan provides an important role model for China, this paper studies the role of the yen/dollar exchange rate for Japanese monetary policy after the shift of Japan from a fixed to a...

Openness for trade can have positive welfare effects in terms of higher growth. But increased openness may also increase uncertainty through a higher volatility of employment. We use regional data from Germany to test whether openness for trade has an impact on volatility. We find a downward...

We explore the impact of mortgage securitization on the international diversification of macroeconomic risk. By making mortgage-related risks internationally tradeable, securitization contributes considerably to better international consumption risk sharing: we find that countries with the most...

Utilizing panel data for 19 OECD countries we find suppor t for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the US helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from 6-digit OECD export...