International efforts to provide global public goods often face the challenges of coordinating national contributions and distributing costs equitably in the face of uncertainty, inequality, and free-riding incentives. In an experimental setting, we distribute endowments unequally among a group...

This paper measures the response of bilateral trade flows to differences in industrial energy prices across countries. Using a panel for the period 1996-2011 including 42 countries, 62 sectors and covering 60% of global merchandise trade, we estimate the short-run effects of sector-level energy...

As we write, the world is still in the grips of a financial crisis. Germany was one of the first countries to bail out a bank in July 2007. Then, in September 2007, the United Kingdom (UK) witnessed a run on a building society, Northern Rock, and the subsequent widespread nationalization of its...

It is now increasingly acknowledged that complex global processes, from the financial to the ecological, connect the fate of communities across the world. Yet the problem-solving capacity of the existing system of global institutions is in many areas not effective, accountable, or fast enough to...

We investigate the dramatic 2008–2009 trade collapse using microdata from a small open economy, Belgium. Belgian trade essentially fell because of reduced quantities and unit prices, rather than fewer firms involved in international transactions, fewer trading partners per firm, or fewer...

The term “globalisation” has survived its first significant sell-by date in modern times. Rightly, it continues to attract policy attention and debate at the very highest levels. Together with just a handful of others—economic growth and inequality, financial crisis, climate change—with...

We exploit a unique panel of 75 metro areas (‘cities’) across the globe and employ a cityfixed effects model to identify the determinants of within-city changes in air pollution concentration between 2005 and 2011. Increasing car and population densities significantly reduce air pollution...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol has a dual objective: to encourage low-cost emission reduction and to promote sustainable development in the host countries of CDM projects. The CDM has by and large delivered on the first objective but arguably not on the second. This...