This paper analyzes empirically the linkages between trade openness, economic growth, and the size of the informal economy. I employ panel VAR techniques in a quarterly panel data set composed of 12 advanced economies over the period from 1964:1 to 2010:4 allowing bi-directional interaction...

Frankel and Rose (1997, 1998) state that greater intensity of trading leads to more highly correlated business cycles across countries. Since 2005 Puerto Rico, which belongs to the US currency area, has suffered from economic stagnation. This raises the issue of whether currency areas lead to...

This paper empirically analyzes the determinants of foreign direct investment for Sub-Saharan African countries and other some developing countries. Our results suggest that both productivity-related policy and exchange rate policy can be effective in sharpening FDI competitiveness, i.e., in...

I find that real variables affect the real exchange rate almost entirely through the relative price of traded goods. This finding casts doubt on the theoretical literature that postulates that real shocks propagate only through the relative price of nontraded goods.

Nontraded inputs account for the lion's share of a Big Mac price (Ong 1997, Parsley and Wei 2003). Major departures from Big Mac PPP may then be explained by the Balassa-Samuelson income differences effect, as shown e.g. by Click (1996). But it has been argued that Click''s result is not robust...

The intent of this paper is to examine the impact of political instability in importing nations on U.S. agricultural trade. A panel data set representing eighty-seven importing countries covering the 1990-2000 period was used to investigate how the degree of democratic practices and three types...

Despite widespread interest in China's growing trade surplus and its impact on other countries, empirical research in these issues is handicapped by the lack of reliable statistics on aggregate import and export prices. Although researchers estimate the trade volumes of China and other East...

A poor country with volatile export prices borrows in international markets. When debt is denominated in foreign currency, there is a temptation to repudiate when export prices are low. Excusable partial defaults reduce this temptation, and help to support lending. The cases of debt denominated...

This paper examines short-run determinants of the U.S. dollar/Malaysian ringgit (USD/MYR) exchange rate based on a simultaneous-equation model. Applying the EGARCH model, the paper finds that the USD/MYR exchange rate is positively associated with the Malaysian real government Treasury bill...

As local exports grow globally, it is important for policymakers to understand the role that exchange rates play on local employment. Using current data, this study first examines business-cycle concordance and synchronization and finds that there is relatively weak correlation between local...