German wages have not increased very rapidly in the last decade despite strong employment growth and a 5 percentage point decline in the unemployment rate. Our analysis shows that a large part of the decline in unemployment was structural. Micro-founded Phillips curves fit the German data rather...

We revisit the relationship between international trade, economic growth and inequality with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. The paper combines two approaches: First, we employ a cross-country panel framework to analyze the macroeconomic effects of international trade on economic...

This paper estimates the effects of trade liberalization on plant productivity. In contrast to previous studies, we distinguish between productivity gains arising from lower tariffs on final goods relative to lower tariffs on intermediate inputs. Lower output tariffs can produce productivity...

This paper examines the mechanisms through which output volatility is related to trade openness using an industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade. The main results are threefold. First, sectors more open to international trade are more volatile. Second, trade is...

This paper seeks to contribute to the unresolved issue of the effect of economic integration on environmental policy. In particular, we discuss the joint impact of trade openness and political uncertainty. Our theory predicts that the effect of trade integreation on the environment is...

Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000) argue that the relation between openness and growth is still an open question. One of the main problems in the assessment of the effect is the endogeneity of the relation. In order to address this issue, this paper applies the identification through heteroskedasticity...

This paper develops and calibrates a simple general equilibrium model with two types of labor and capital for the French economy. The simulation results indicate that targeted reductions in employer social security taxes have six times as large an effect on employment as untargeted reductions...

We estimate a latent factor model that decomposes international stock returns into global, country-, and industry-specific shocks and allows for stock-specific exposures to these shocks. We find that across stocks there is substantial dispersion in these exposures, which is partly explained by...

When a country''s banking system becomes more linked to the global banking network, does that system get more or less prone to a banking crisis? Using model simulations and econometric estimates based on a world-wide dataset, we find an M-shaped relationship between financial stability of a...