Recent research in international economic history has opened up new lines of enquiry on the origins of globalization, as well as its causes and consequences. Such findings have the potential to inform contemporary debates and this paper considers what lessons this body of historical work has for...

Conventional wisdom in economic history suggests that conflict between countries can be enormously disruptive of economic activity, especially international trade. We study the effects of war on bilateral trade with available data extending back to 1870. Using the gravity model, we estimate the...

Measured by the ratio of trade to output, the period 1870 1913 marked the birth of the first era of trade globalization and the period 1914 39 its death. What caused the boom and bust? We use an augmented gravity model to examine the gold standard, tariffs, and transport costs as determinants of...

This paper discusses the recent regional trade agreements that China has concluded rapidly following accession to the WTO in 2002. Agreements are in place with Hong Kong, Macao, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand, and are either in negotiation or under discussion with South Africa, Chile, India,...

This paper examines the home country bias in the goods market among OECD countries. An average country imports about two and a half times as much from itself as from an otherwise identical foreign country, after controlling for sizes of exporter and importer, their direct distance, geographic...

We study cross-country insurance in a currency union with nominal price and wage rigidities. We provide two results that build the case for the creation of a fiscal union within a currency union. First, we show that, if financial markets are incomplete, the value of gaining access to any given...

This paper examines the sources of current conflict within the EU and the EMU. The topics discussed include the recent ECB policy of bond buying (the OMT policy), the attempts to advance the "European Project" of stronger political union (the fiscal compact, the banking union, and the proposals...

Regional trade in South America since independence has long been much smaller than would be expected if geography were the only constraint on trade. Several potential explanations exist: low technological and demand complementarities; low productivity; high barriers to trade. We first argue that...

What do trade negotiators negotiate about? There are two distinct theoretical approaches in the economics literature that offer an answer to this question: the terms-of-trade theory and the commitment theory. The terms-of-trade theory holds that trade agreements are useful to governments as a...

This paper analyzes competing interpretations for the large increases in the hoarding of international reserves by developing countries. While the first phase of the rapid hoarding of reserves in the aftermath of the East Asian crisis has been dominated by self insurance against exposure to...