The international business cycle is very important for Latin America's economic performance as the recent global crisis vividly illustrated. This paper investigates how changes in trade linkages between China, Latin America, and the rest of the world have altered the transmission mechanism of...

We study the impact of intra-industry trade and capital mobility on steady state welfare and on the stability properties of two countries with identical technologies and preferences. We consider a two-factor overlapping generations model, featuring one-sector of differentiated goods with taste...

The financial crisis led to a deep recession in many industrial countries. While large emerging countries recovered relatively quickly from the financial crisis, their performance deteriorated in the recent years, despite the modest recovery in advanced economies. The higher divergence of...

During the period 1991-93, Finland experienced the deepest economic downturn in an industrialized country since the 1930s. We argue that the culprit behind this Great Depression was the collapse of Finnish trade with the Soviet Union, because it induced a costly restructuring of the...

How does the asymmetry of labor market institutions affect the adjustment of a currency union to shocks? To answer this question, this paper sets up a dynamic currency union model with monopolistic competition and sticky prices, hiring frictions and real wage rigidities. In our analysis, we...

This paper examines the impact of education, governance and North-South trade- and distance-related technology diffusion on TFP in the South, focusing on South America (SA), Mexico, Latin America (LA) and East Asia for the 32-year period preceding the Great Recession (1976–2007) in a new model...

In this paper, we investigate the economic returns to industrial espionage by linking information from East Germany's foreign intelligence service to sector-specific gaps in total factor productivity (TFP) between West and East Germany. Based on a dataset that comprises the entire flow of...

This paper examines the impact of education, trade, governance and distance on technology diffusion and TFP in Latin America - specifically South America and Mexico (SAM) - and East Asia, over the 32 years preceding the Great Recession (1976-2007). Findings are: i) TFP rises with education,...

In an environment of accelerating technological change and increasing digitalization, firms need to adopt new technologies faster than ever before to stay competitive. This paper examines whether updates of education curricula help to bring new technologies faster into firms' workplaces. We...

The 19th and 20th centuries saw a transformation in contraceptive technologies and their take up. This led to a sexual revolution, which witnessed a rise in premarital sex and out-of-wedlock births, and a decline in marriage. The impact of contraception on married and single life is analyzed...