In recent years wages in China have been rising and the yuan has appreciated, potentially eroding China's cost advantage in manufactures. This paper explores the evolution of China's relative unit labor costs in manufacturing over 1998-2009. Between 1998 and 2003 China's unit labor costs fell,...

The foreign debts of the European countries are at the core of the current crises. Generally, the crises are attributed to government budget deficits in excess of the values stated in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP)/Maastricht treaty. Proposals for reform generally involve increasing the...

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 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...

This paper studies within a multi-country model with international trade the stability of international environmental agreements (IEAs) when countries regulate carbon emissions either by taxes or caps. Regardless of whether coalitions play Nash or are Stackelberg leaders the principal message 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...

This paper reviews the economics approach to conflict and national borders. The paper (a) provides a summary of ideas and concepts from the economics literature on the size of nations; (b) illustrates them within a simple analytical framework where populations fight over borders and resources,...

We examine the relationship between capitalism and income inequality for a large sample of countries using an adjusted economic freedom index as proxy for capitalism and Gini coefficients based on gross-income as proxy for income inequality. Our results suggest that there is no robust...

This paper reviews the most significant recent developments in the theory of trade agreements. The paper offers an integrated approach to evaluating trade agreements, and uses the approach to present results on preferential and multilateral trade agreements. The paper identifies also several...