This paper studies empirically the relationship between trade policy and individual income risk and uses the empirical estimates of this relationship to asses the welfare costs of changes in trade policy. The empirical analysis proceeds in two steps. First, longitudinal data on income of Mexican...

Existing evidence for unconditional convergence in the OECD is mixed, and depends largely on whether time series or cross sectional methods are used. In this paper we reconsider the evidence for unconditional convergence by dividing the long run data into several subperiods. We use a two stage...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a "tormented insurer" who tries to smooth government outlays given the randomness of public revenues and in a challenging world in which "liability dollarization" requires them to issue debt denominated in hard currencies, or indexed to tradable...