We calculate welfare gains of trade liberalization in the Central and East European transition economies, following the approach of Romer (1994), who emphasized that proper modeling of the impact of trade restrictions on the number of available product varieties is crucial to quantifying the...

There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the quality content of Chinese exports and to what extent China imposes a threat to the market positions of advanced economies. While China’s export structure is very similar to that of the advanced world, its export unit values are well below...

Perfect integration eludes the real world, so we suggest a realistic benchmark standard for judging the extent of market integration in various economies. We estimate the degree of integration in the US product market, widely acknowledged to be the most integrated among geographically large...

The financial crisis has shown that the liquidity creation function of banks is critical for the economy. In this paper, we empirically investigate whether bank liquidity creation fosters economic growth in a large emerging market, Russia. We follow the methodology of Berger and Bouwman (2009)...

Causality between the ratio of domestic private credit to GDP and growth in real GDP per capita is investigated in a country-by-country time-series framework for 24 OECD economies over the period 1980–2013. The proposed threefold methodology to test for causal linkages integrates (i)...

This paper provides evidence on the relationship between finance and high growth in China. Employing data for 27 Chinese provinces over the period 1995–2003, we assess the impact of banks and non-bank financial institutions on local economic growth. We argue that banks have had a larger impact...

This paper examines the FDI-exchange rate nexus in the context of one FDI source and two host countries. It focuses on the effect of exchange rates on relative FDI inflows between the two host countries. The theoretical analysis shows explicitly that relative FDI inflows are a function of...

Traditional assessments of the impact of exchange rate depreciation or appreciation on trade have involved estimating the elasticity of trade volume to relative prices. Such studies relied heavily on aggregated trade data. More recent studies employ bilateral trade data and methodologies such as...

The paper investigates the influences of financial development on patterns of industrial specialization across China’s regions. We find that industrial sectors reliant on access to external finance are found to concentrate in regions with developed financial markets. Both foreign direct...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of corruption in bank lending. Corruption is expected to hamper bank lending, as it is closely related to legal enforcement, which has been shown to promote banks’ willingness to lend. Nevertheless the similarities between the consequences for...