This paper examines whether importing intermediate goods improves plant performance. While addressing the issue of simultaneity of a productivity shock and decisions to import intermediates, we estimate the impact of the use of foreign intermediates on plants' productivity using plant-level...

This paper examines the hypothesis that a greater stock of migrants in New Zealand from a particular country leads to more trade between that country and New Zealand. The literature suggests that migrants can stimulate trade by lowering transaction costs, and by bringing with them preferences...

Competition has pervasive and long-lasting effects on economic performance by affecting economic actors’ incentive structures, by encouraging their innovative activities, by stimulating technology spillovers, and by selecting more efficient firms from less efficient ones over time. A...

This paper shows that systemic risk exerts a significant impact on the behavior of depositors, sometimes overshadowing their responses to standard bank fundamentals. Systemic risk can affect market discipline both regardless of and through bank fundamentals. First, worsening systemic conditions...

The aim of the present paper is to analyze the pass-through from exchange rate to inflation in Brazil from 1980 to 2002. Initially, we developed a model of a profit-maximizing firm based on the pricing-to-market approach presented by FEENSTRA and KENDAL (1997). In order to adapt the model to the...

This paper uses dynamic factor analysis to investigate the sources of foreign shocks and the propagation mechanism of these disturbances into two small open economies, Australia and Canada. Panels including a variety of foreign and domestic series for each country are used to estimate the...

This paper examines the impact of trade costs on real exchange rate volatil- ity. We model two channels endogenously in a Ricardian framework: (i) non- tradability and (ii) heterogeneous suppliers of traded goods. The ¯rst channel is examined by constructing a two-country Ricardian model of...

The paper explores the implications of means of payment substitutability and capital mobility on the properties of the money demand, using the Thomas (1985) stochastic dynamic optimising model, where the specific role of money is explicitly accounted for. Extending the model to a case in which...

We examine the role of different explanations for the lack of flows of capital from rich to poor countries---the Lucas paradox---in an empirical framework. Broadly speaking, the theoretical explanations for this paradox include differences in fundamentals affecting the production structure...

This study examines the dynamics associated with an economy implementing an Exchange Rate Based Stabilization (ERBS) programs when they are subject to sudden restrictions in international capital flows. In the context of a simple theoretical model, we describe the pressures on a country's...