The global financial crisis has reiterated the need for Africa to build resilience to global output shocks. In this paper we examine empirically the role of intra-regional and intra-African trade linkages in being an absorber of the global output shocks in two African regional economic...

We study the impact of skilled immigrants on the employment structures of U.S. …firms using matched employer-employee data. Unlike most previous work, we use the …firm as the lens of analysis to account for a greater level of heterogeneity and the fact that many skilled immigrant admissions...

National borders reduce trade, but most estimates of the border effect seem puzzlingly large. We show that major methodological innovations of the last decade combine to shrink the border effect to a mere 28% reduction in international trade ows worldwide. The border effect varies across...

I carry out a power analysis of changes in voting weights and rules in the Nice Treaty of the EU on the widening and deepening of European integration, by applying methods that use Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices. Significant decrease in voting power of small countries makes widening of...

The main goal of regionalization is the creation of free trade areas and the guarantee for countries to accede to a widened market. Many studies dealing with the effects of regional free trade agreements on trade flows already exist in the economic literature and the explosion of regional...

This study evaluates the impact of high-skilled immigrants on US technology formation. We use reduced-form specifications that exploit large changes in the H-1B visa program. Higher H-1B admissions increase immigrant science and engineering (SE) employment and patenting by inventors with Indian...

In this paper, we present evidence on the statistical features of observed dispersion in HICP inflation rates in the Euro area. Our descriptive exercise shows that there is still a remarkable dispersion of HICP inflation rates across the member countries. We find that most of dispersion...

This paper analyses trade specialisation dynamics in two Eastern European countries (Romania and Bulgaria - EEC-2) vis-à-vis the core EU member states (EU-15) over the period 1990-2006. Specifically, we focus on whether there is a shift towards intra-industry trade leading to economic...

We use rolling cointegration to measure the convergence of base money, M2, the consumer price index and industrial output between two reference countries, Germany and France, and recent EU members and some transition economy candidates. Counties that recently joined the EU exhibit time-varying...

This paper modifies the two-industry, two-country Heckscher-Ohlin model with intermediate goods to decompose trade into its horizontal and vertical intra-industry, as well as inter-industry parts. Acknowledging that liberalization affects each type of trade differently, and that changes in each...