This paper explores the impact of credit market on the entrepreneurs and demand for credit in a credit constrained economy and the resultant impact on the capital flows. In standard trade models the capital flows across countries are explained as a result of the rate of return differentials due...

Are natural resources a 'curse' or a 'blessing'? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource...

Using data from more than 100 economies for the period of 1975 to 2005, we conduct an extensive empirical analysis of the determinants of international reserve holdings. Four groups of determinants, namely, traditional macro variables, financial variables, institutional variables, and dummy...

This paper provides new evidence on the stochastic behaviour of the EPU (Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index constructed by Baker et al. (2016) in six of the biggest economies (Canada, France, Japan, US, Ireland, and Sweden) over the period from January 1985 to October 2019. In particular,...

The paper reviews recent literature on the economics of migration and diasporas, focusing on economic gains and opportunities that these diasporas could represent for home countries. In addition, the paper discusses policies aimed at leveraging this "diaspora capital"

We generalise the traditional development-accounting framework to an open-economy setting. In addition to factor endowments and productivity, relative factor costs emerge as a source of real-income variation across countries. These are shaped by bilateral trade determinants (which underpin the...

This paper focuses on the analysis of the long-run response of the Real Exchange Rate (RER) to political risks and tests whether non-economic variables have an impact on RER in 31 emerging and developing countries. We use annual data from the International Country Risk Guide database over the...

IMF programs are often considered to carry a “stigma” that triggers adverse market reactions. We show that such a negative IMF effect disappears when accounting for endogenous selection into programs. To proxy for a country's access to financial markets, we use credit ratings and investor...

In this paper we build a model of trade in vertically differentiated products and find that income inequality can affect the demand for imports even in the presence of homothetic preferences. The empirical importance of changes in inequality on the demand for imports is then assessed by...