Abstract: The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or a specific set of countries (for example, a weather-related...

Since the seminal work of Krugman (1979), product variety has played a central role in models of trade and growth. In spite of the general use of love-of-variety models, there has been no systematic study of how the import of new varieties has contributed to national welfare gains in the United...

This paper shows how the institutional rules imposed on its signatories by the GATT created a strategic incentive for countries to liberalize gradually. Free trade can never be achieved if punishment for deviation from a trade agreement is limited to a 'withdrawal of equivalent concessions.'...

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attack to the twin towers and ensuing heightened national security measures worldwide, but particularly in the United States, are modeled to be equivalent to a thickening of trade barriers in international trade. By estimating a gravity model with a stochastic...

This paper examines the issue of sustaining free trade when countries receive imperfect private information about each other’s non-tariff barriers. Because the countries can misrepresent their private belief about other countries’ protection levels, the punishment scheme to deter...

: This paper tests the random walk hypothesis for the stock markets of the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, Hong Kong and Australia using unit root tests and spectral analysis. The results based upon the augmented Dicky Fuller (1979) and Phillips-Perron (1988) tests and spectral analysis find that...

We show that very little is needed to create liquidity under-supply in equilibrium: only the presence of credit constraints on demand. We show that the under-supply is a non-monotone function of the demand distortion that causes it, a result that may have interesting implications for emerging...

This paper presents both the time-series and cross-country evidence on the growth of global equity markets and attempts to shed some light on the sources of equity market growth. Using data on 33 countries, I find that development of financial intermediaries and openness to trade are positively...

We examine the equity market price interdependence between Australia, on one hand, and Japan, US, UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea, on the other hand, based on Hacker and Hatemi-J (2003) bootstrap causality tests with leveraged adjustments. We cover the period January 1, 1993 to...

Surveys of Australian superannuation funds verify that most international bond holdings, but not equity holdings, are hedged for currency risk. We compare the mean-variance efficiency of this practice with two alternative strategies: a conventional forward hedge; and a selective hedge triggered...