Shocks stemming from Brazil - the large neighbor in South America - have historically been a source of concern for policy-makers in other countries of the region. This paper studies the importance of Brazil's influence on its neighboring economies, documenting trade linkages over the last two...

Abstract: Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles. Our model allows us to assess the roles...

This paper examines the spatial dispersion effects of regional conflicts, defined as internal or external armed conflicts in contiguous states, on international trade. Our empirical findings-based on different measures of conflict constructed using alternate definitions of contiguity and...

The literature measuring the impact of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTA) and WTO membership on trade flows has produced remarkably diverse results. Rose's (2004) seminal paper reports a range of specifications that show no WTO effects, but Subramanian and Wei (2007) contend that he does not...

Global linkages are changing amidst elevated geopolitical tensions and a surge in policies directed at increasing supply chain resilience and national security. Using granular bilateral data, this paper provides new evidence of trade and investment fragmentation along geopolitical lines since...

China and Africa have forged a strong economic relationship since China's accession to the WTO in 2001. This paper examines the evolution of these economic ties starting in the early 2000s, and the subsequent shift in the relationship triggered by the commodity price collapse in 2015 and by the...

This paper studies how output fluctuations in Russia are transmitted internationally. Using vector autoregression (VAR) and dynamic panel models, the paper finds that Russia's output fluctuations are an important driver of output fluctuations of countries in the region, especially for oil...

In this paper we seek to answer the question of how the patterns of bilateral trade are altered by rising trade policy uncertainty (TPU). Specifically, we investigate whether geopolitical alignments between country pairs determine how bilateral trade flows react during periods of greater...

If sectoral trade flows obey structural gravity, countries' bilateral trade imbalances are the result of macro trade imbalances, "triangular trade", or pairwise asymmetric trade barriers. Using data for 40 major economies and the Rest of the World, we show that large and pervasive asymmetries in...