Inter-country equity in the taxation of IP is a contentious issue. With its BEPS initiative, the OECD aims at taxing in accordance with value creation even though there are admitted difficulties in determining the actual place of value creation. The European Commission promotes the introduction...

Swap lines between advanced-economy central banks are a new important part of the global financial architecture. This paper analyses their monetary policy effects from three perspectives. First, from the perspective of the central banks, it shows that the swap line mimics discount-window credit...

The debate on trade wars and currency wars has re-emerged since the Great recession of 2009. We study the two forms of non-cooperative policies within a single framework. First, we compare the elasticity of trade flows to import tariffs and to the real exchange rate, based on product level data...

Occasional crises have been shown to be part of growth enhancing mechanism (see Rancière, Tornell and Westermann, 2008). In this paper, we document that neither the stereotypical case study of India vs. Thailand, nor the benchmark growth-regression in this earlier research support this result...

Globalization has led to huge increases in import volumes, but the literature on import forecasting is still in its infancy. We introduce the first leading indicator especially constructed for total import growth, the so-called Import Climate. It builds on the idea that the import demand of the...

Somatic distance, or differences in physical appearance, proves to be extremely important in the gravity model of bilateral trade in conformity with results in other areas of economics and outside of it in the social sciences. This is also true quite independently of survey evidence about...