When did Germany become economically integrated? Within the framework of a gravity model, based on a new data set of about 40,000 observations on trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885-1933, I explore the geography of trade costs across Central Europe. There...

We analyze the transmission of global financial crisis to business cycles in China and India. The pattern of business cycles in emerging Asian economies generally displays a low degree of synchronization with the OECD countries, which is consistent with the decoupling hypothesis. By contrast,...

This paper shows that subsidy competition may be efficiency enhancing. We model a subsidy game among two asymmetric regions in a new trade model, where capital can freely move among regions, but capital rewards are repatriated. We study subsidy competition, starting from an equilibrium where the...

This paper investigates the sources and size of trade barriers at the industry level. We derive a micro-founded measure of industry-specific bilateral trade integration that has an in-built control for time-varying multilateral resistance. This trade integration measure is consistent with a...

This paper identifies conditions under which, starting from any tax distorting equilibrium, destination- and origin-based indirect tax-harmonizing reforms are potentially Pareto improving in the presence of global public goods. The first condition (unrequited transfers between governments)...

To what extent do countries' corporate income tax (CIT) rates attract foreign tax bases? What are the revenue implications of a unilateral tax reduction when tax bases are internationally mobile? These questions are explored using a panel of annual data from 17 OECD countries spanning the period...

Low international competitiveness of a set of euro area countries, which have become evident by large current account deficits and rising risk premiums on government bonds, is one of the most challenging economic policy issues for Europe. We analyse the role of private restructuring and public...

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...

Cultural and institutional differences among nations may result in differences in the ratios of marginal costs of goods in autarchy and thus be the basis of specialization and comparative advantage, as long as these differences are not eliminated by trade. We provide an evolutionary model of...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...