The economic history of Argentina presents one of the most dramatic examples of divergence in the modern era. What happened and why? This paper reviews the wide range of competing explanations in the literature and argues that, setting aside deeper social and political determinants, the various...

The episodes of stock market crises in Europe and the U.S.A.since the year 2000,and the fragility of the international stock markets,have sparked the interest of researchers in understanding and in modeling the markets’ rising volatilities in order to prevent against crises.Portfolio managers...

The episodes of stock market crises in Europe and the U.S.A. since the year 2000,and the fragility of the New Technology sector after the explosion of the speculative bubble,have sparked the interest of researchers in understanding and in modeling this market’s high volatility to prevent...

The political economy of resource rich countries is surveyed. The empirical evidence suggests that countries with a large share of primary exports in GNP have bad growth records and high inequality, especially if the quality of institutions and the rule of law are bad. The economic argument that...

This Paper documents that the rise of (Western) Europe between 1500 and 1850 is largely accounted for by the growth of European nations with access to the Atlantic, and especially by those nations that engaged in colonialism and long distance oceanic trade. Moreover, Atlantic ports grew much...

Current orthodoxy suggests that the Industrial Revolution began in Europe because European institutions promoted comparatively high levels of market efficiency. This Paper compares the actual efficiency of markets in Europe and China, two regions of the world that were relatively advanced in the...

In this paper, we provide aggregate trends in China’s trade performance from the 1840s to the present. Based on historical benchmarks, we argue that China’s recent gains are not exclusively due to the reforms since 1978. Rather, foreign economic activity can be understood by developments...

International trade can have profound effects on domestic institutions. We examine this proposition in the context of medieval Venice circa 800-1600. Early on, the growth of longdistance trade enriched a broad group of merchants who used their newfound economic muscle to push for constraints on...

We work with a panel of bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002, exploring the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. We are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where...

This Paper asks the question of the impact of institutions on trade and tries to estimate the potential for trade increase between CIS, Central Eastern European countries and the EU. The latter is computed using the gravity equation and the procedure introduced by Hausman and Taylor (1981). It...