Continental trade blocs are emerging in many parts of the world almost in tandem. If trade blocs are required to satisfy the McMillan criterion of not lowering their trade volume with outside countries, they have to engage in a dramatic reduction of trade barriers against non-member countries....

The dramatic implosion and regionalization of international trade during the 1930s has often been blamed on the trade and foreign exchange policies that emerged in the interwar period. We provide new evidence on the impact of trade and currency blocs on trade flows from 1928 1938 that suggests a...

Recent proposals for enlarging the European Community to include the EFTA countries raise the question of whether the new members should participate in a European Monetary Union. In part, the issue hinges on the incidence of aggregate supply and demand disturbances. We use data on prices and...

The economic effects from labor market integration are crucially affected by the extent to which countries are open to trade. In this paper we build a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with trade in goods and labor mobility across countries to study and quantify the economic...

We try to demonstrate how economists may engage in research on comparative politics, relating the size and composition of government spending to the political system. A Downsian model of electoral competition and forward-looking voting indicates that majoritarian -- as opposed to proportional --...

In recent years, analysts and policy makers alike have been evaluating the nexus between exchange rates and macroeconomic stability. Among the most important questions is why have some countries adopted rigid, including fixed, exchange-rate paper addresses this question from a political economy...

In this paper we analyze empirically the most important implications of two family political economy models of inflation: the "myopic? government approach and the "weak" government approach. In myopic government models inflation is the deliberate outcome of politicians strategic behavior, while...