Current U.S. trade policy stresses establishing free trade areas (FTAs) with partners spanning the globe. Motivations include enhancing goods and services trade; stimulating investment flows; extending standards on intellectual property rights, labor, and the environment; and addressing...

A robust empirical determinant of long-term economic growth in many developing countries has been the expansion and diversification of the export sector. The latter, in turn, has been influenced by capital accumulation and economic growth. The growth model developed here explores this...

The scramble to expand deposit guarantees in Europe in response to recent financial turmoil confirms that the on-going integration of European financial markets requires closer coordination of prudential policies and financial safety nets. We study the optimal design of prudential supervision...

This paper studies how fiscal rules interact with the intergovernmental fiscal framework to foster fiscal discipline among European subnational governments. We use political variables describing the fiscal attitudes of the central government as instruments to obtain consistent estimates of the...

We develop and test a theory of the rule of law and environmental policy formation. In our model an increase in the degree of rule of law has two opposing partial effects on environmental policy: first, a greater share of policy decisions are implemented according to law; second, industry...

An increasing number of tropical timber producing nations have enacted bans on export of logs. Proponents argue that a log export ban is a second-best policy tool for addressing environmental externalities; it also creates more jobs and improves scale efficiencies domestically. Theoretical...

This paper studies the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agriculture. To do so, gravity models are estimated using data on bilateral investment relationships, together with newly constructed indicators of agro-ecological suitability in areas with low population density as...