Noting that "one size does not fit all" in the case of the finance-growth (FG) nexus, a growing body of literature has recently focused on uncovering economic conditions under which financial development could be beneficial (detrimental) to economic development. We look into these conditions by...

There has been a wide debate on whether democracy actually has an effect on economic outcomes, and especially on international trade. With a new estimation strategy, we analyze this relationship taking a look at the distribution of countries ́trading activity. Using a panel quantile estimation...

This paper evaluates the performance of alternative estimation methods for multiplicative and log models with heteroskedasticity. Contrary to Santos Silva and Tenreyro (2006), the results of a simulation study indicate that the Pseudo Poisson Maximum Likelihood estimator (PPML) is not always the...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (e.g., the IMF) and a country has for optimal (conditional) reform design. The main result is that the informational advantage of the country must be strictly greater than the advantage of the multilateral in order...

Applied general and partial equilibrium models are widely used tools for ex ante analysis of trade policy changes. However, simulation results seem to exhibit significant variation across publications, and the often criticised 'black box' character of applied trade models makes meaningful...

The past literature presents ambiguous evidence about the bidirectional and causal influences between countries ́institutional framework and their trading activity. In our analysis, we investigate the relationship between institutions and trade constructing a measure of institutions from the...

This paper presents a theoretical gravity model of trade in which foreign aid is considered as a transfer instead of being part of the trade cost, as it has been previously done in the related literature. We argue that the usual specification leads to invalid out-of-sample predictions, biased...