This paper provides a new cross-country evaluation of competitiveness, focusing on the linkages between productivity and export performance among European economies. We use the information compiled in the Trade module of CompNet to establish new stylized facts regarding the joint distributions...

We quantify the effect of container technology on transport costs and trade by estimating the modal choice between containerization and breakbulk shipping using micro-level trade data. The model is motivated by novel facts that relate container usage to shipment, destination and firm...

This paper analyzes whether nation-state governments can increase their credibility by becoming members of international organizations. Credibility is an important asset because it determines the real interest rate and is expected to have an important impact on investment and growth. It is...

We argue that membership in International Organizations (IOs) is an important determinant of FDI inflows. To the extent that membership restricts a country from pursuing policies that are harmful to investors, it can signal low political risk. Using data over the 1971-2005 period, we find that...

I consider a model in which an asset owner must decide how much to invest in his asset mindful of the fact that an encroacher's valuation of the asset is increasing in the asset owner's investment. Due to incomplete property rights, the encroacher and asset owner engage in a contest over the...

We study the role of inter-group differences in the emergence of conflict. In our setting, two groups compete for the right to allocate societys resources, and we allow for costly intergroup mobility. The winning group offers an allocation, that the opposition can either accept, or reject and...

This paper studies sabotage in a contest with non-identical players. Unlike previous papers, we consider sabotage in an elimination contest and allow contestants to sabotage a potential or future rival. It turns out that for a certain partition of players there is a pure-strategy equilibrium in...

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have proliferated over the past 50 years such that the number of pairs of countries with BITs is roughly as large as the number of country-pairs that belong to bilateral or regional preferential trade agreements (PTAs). The purpose of this study is to provide...

What is the impact on intra-national trade and regional economic outcomes when the quality and lane-capacity of an existing paved road network is expanded significantly? We investigate this question for the case of Turkey, which undertook a large-scale public investment in roads during the...