According to the WTO data for regional trade agreements (RTA), the number of RTA has been exponentially growing since the middle of the 1990s. As a result, many countries these days have had more than one free trade partner country. In this paper, we attempt to find out statistically important...

The proliferation of overlapping free trade agreements (FTA) in the recent years has led to hub-and-spokes (HAS) throughout the world. Being avid subscribers to FTAs, many countries in the Asia-Pacific region including the USA, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Australia have become...

This paper provides an empirical explanation to the observed disparity in cross-border M&A inflows to developing and developed countries over the last two decades. We show two main results. First, the disparity can be attributed to the difference in the quality of institutions between the two...