International trade has been cited as a source of widening wage inequality in industrial nations. Consistent with this claim, we find a significant export wage premium for high-skilled workers in German manufacturing and an export wage discount for lower skilled workers, using matched...

Political business cycle theories predict that the occurrence and outcome of elections affect the timing of business cycle turning points. Opportunistic political business cycle theory predicts that a contraction is more likely to end soon after an election than at other times. Rational partisan...

Daily foreign exchange operations by the Federal Reserve are not revealed to the public contemporaneously or, up until recently, even years after the fact. With the recent release of daily intervention data it is now possible to gauge the accuracy of the market's perceptions of the Fed's foreign...

This paper reviews six English-language books on the economy of Israel. Each book was written or edited by Israelis, and each is from a different decade. The earliest book, Don Patinkin's The Israel Economy: The First Decade, was written in the late 1950s, and the most recent volume, The Israeli...

This paper shows that the effect of capital account liberalization on growth depends upon the environment in which that policy occurs. A theoretical model demonstrates the possibility of an inverted-U shaped relationship between the responsiveness of growth to capital account liberalization and...

The effects of capital account openness on economic growth may vary across countries. Some countries may not have in place the constellation of institutions required to fully benefit from open capital accounts. Other countries may realize only small marginal improvements in the wake of capital...

This paper addresses the question of whether societies that afford economic opportunity to women offer other opportunities as well. The analysis in this paper shows that the performance of a country's women in international athletic competition reflects the degree of their relative participation...

Dollarization has been suggested as a policy that might, among other goals, promote trade between a country adopting the dollar and the United States. Evidence supporting this conjecture could be drawn from a recent series of papers by Rose and co-authors who show that a currency union increases...

This paper examines the pattern of controls on capital inflows, and the association of these controls on financial variables, GDP, and exchange rates. A key point of the paper is the distinction between long-standing controls on a broad range of assets (walls) and episodic controls that are...

The effects of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are disputed. In this paper, we assess these effects using capital market data and an event-study approach, using a daily data set covering a thousand announcements spanning over eighty economies and a hundred RTAs over twenty recent years. We...