In this paper we show that price equalization alone is not sufficient to determine the barriers to international trade. There are many barrier combinations that deliver price equalization, but each combination implies a different volume of trade. We demonstrate this first theoretically in a...

In this study, we systematically evaluate the potential of a bunch of survey-based indicators from different economic branches to forecasting export growth across a multitude of European countries. Our pseudo out-of-sample analyses reveal that the best-performing indicators beat a well-specified...

Since the recovery from the great financial crisis in 2010, global real trade flows grew much slower than pre-crisis, in both absolute terms (growth rates) and relative terms (relative to GDP, from 2:1 in the great 1990's to 1:1 since 2012) A debate has arisen as to whether this global trade...

In the basic model of the literature on international environmental agreements (IEAs) (Barrett 1994; Rubio and Ulph 2006) the number of signatories of self-enforcing IEAs does not exceed three, if non-positive emissions are ruled out. We extend that model by introducing a composite consumer good and...

We investigate the formation of global climate agreements (= stable grand climate coalitions) in a model, in which climate policy takes the form of carbon emission taxation and fossil fuel and consumption goods are traded on world markets. We expand the model of Eichner and Pethig (2014) by...

We examine how trade openness influences income inequality within countries. The sample includes 139 countries over the period 1970-2014. We employ predicted openness as instrument to deal with the endogeneity of trade openness. The effect of trade openness on income inequality differs across...

Purchasing power adjusted incomes applied in cross-country comparisons are measured with bias. In this paper, we estimate the purchasing power parity (PPP) bias in Penn World Table incomes and provide corrected incomes. The bias is substantial and systematic: the poorer a country, the more its...

Since the late 1970s, the price indices underlying the poverty lines in India have been updated using aggregate indices. Widespread criticism of these indices led to the adoption of a new official methodology in 2011 based on unit values from consumption survey data. We propose an alternative...

Economists around the world rely in addition to official statistics on business (and consumer) surveys, which are more up-to-date. However, for many emerging and developing countries there is a lack of such surveys. This gap can, at least partly, be filled by the Ifo World Economic Survey (WES)....

We examine sources of biased terror perceptions. In particular, we investigate how international experts of the IFO World Economic Survey assess the effect of terror on the world economy and the economy of their own country. The results show that respondents from terror stricken countries have...