This paper uses 68 measures of trade policy and trade liberalization to ask if membership in theWorld Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is associated with more liberal trade policy. Almost no measures of trade policy are significantly...

This paper addresses the issue of whether regimes of fixed exchange rates are a mechanism for shifting volatility inter- temporally. Using a panel of data covering twenty industrialized countries from 1959 through 1993, I examine the volatilities of a host of real and monetary variables....

Fixed exchange rates are less volatile than floating rates. But the volatility of macroeconomic variables such as money and output does not change very much across exchange rate regimes. This suggests that exchange rate models based only on macroeconomic fundamentals are unlikely to be very...

We use a panel of annual data for over one hundred developing countries from 1971 through 1992 to characterize currency crashes. We define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation. We examine...

A gravity model is used to assess the separate effects of exchange rate volatility and currency unions on international trade. The panel data set used includes bilateral observations for five years spanning 1970 through 1990 for 186 countries. In this data set, there are over one hundred...

We study empirically the macroeconomic effects of an explicit de jure quantitative goal for monetary policy. Quantitative goals take three forms: exchange rates, money growth rates, and inflation targets. We analyze the effects on inflation of both having a quantitative target, and of hitting a...

What is the effect of trade on a country's environment, for a given level of GDP? Some have observed an apparent positive correlation between openness to trade and measures of environmental quality. But this could be due to endogeneity of trade, rather than causality. This paper uses exogenous...

This paper characterizes the integration patterns of international currency unions (such as the CFA Franc zone and the East Caribbean Currency Area). We empirically explore different features of currency unions, and compare them both to countries with sovereign monies, and to regions within...

We develop a procedure to rank-order countries and commodities using dis-aggregated American imports data. We find strong evidence that both countries and commodities can be ranked, consistent with the product cycle' hypothesis. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United States...

This paper is concerned with the fact that the incidence of speculative attacks tends to be temporally correlated; that is, currency crises appear to pass contagiously from one country to another. The paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature, and analyzes the contagious nature of...