In this paper, we establish the importance of experience in international trade in reducing unmeasured trade costs and facilitating bilateral trade. We find a strong role for experience, measured in years of positive trade, for both aggregate and sectoral bilateral trade. In an augmented gravity...

We use monthly stock market indices for 58 countries to construct pairwise correlations of returns and explain these correlations with differences in the industrial structure across these countries. We find that countries with similar industries have stock markets that exhibit high correlation...

The empirical literature on the effect of trade agreements has reached a consensus that WTO effects are insignificant or modest at best especially compared to the robust and strong positive effect of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on bilateral trade (Rose, 2004; Eicher and Henn, 2011; Baier and...

We draw upon recent advances that combine causal inferences with machine learning, to show that poverty is the key income distribution measure that matters for development outcomes. In a predictive framework, we first show that LASSO chooses only the headcount measure of poverty from 37 income...

There continues to be substantial debate on whether and how providing inclusive access to finance through microcredit promotes entrepreneurship-led development at the base of the pyramid. We contribute to this literature by examining differences in household-level outcomes associated with...

The promise of emerging and developing economies has created unprecedented interest from businesses in recent times. Yet, the reality of these economies, are levels of volatility that are unheard of in developed markets. For example, there have been 435 currency crises across 195 countries over...

The dramatic impact of the current crisis on performance of businesses across sectors and economies have been headlining the business press for the past many months. Interestingly, the impact of the crisis across categories of goods/services and across economies reveals several interesting...

We use 6-digit bilateral trade data to document the effect of WTO/GATT membership on the extensive and intensive product margins of trade.We construct gravity equations for the two product margins motivated by Chaney (2008). The empirical results show that standard gravity variables provide good...