In this paper, we study if exposure to the institutions of trade partners changes individuals' attitudes towards democracy and favors the process of democratization. We combine survey data with country-level measures of democracy from 1960 to 2015, and exploit the improvement in air, relative to...

This paper posits a formal political economy model where the principle of reciprocity in multilateral trade talks results in the gradual elimination of tariffs. Reciprocity trade talks turn each nation’s exporters into anti-protectionists at home; they lower foreign tariffs by convincing their...

In his papers during the lead up to the birth of the European Monetary Union, Obstfeld considered whether the countries forming the EMU were sufficiently similar to survive a single monetary policy--and more importantly, whether they had the capacity to adjust to asymmetric shocks given a single...

While recent research has explored the phenomenon of drug parallel trade in regulated environments such as the European Union (EU), or the European Economic Area, little is known about the mechanisms that explain its origin or the role of the distribution chain in exporting and importing...

This paper asks whether Germany was ever an economically integrated area. I explore the geography of trade costs in a new data set of about 40,000 observations on regional trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885 – 1933. There are three key results. First, the...

We study the role of brokers in selection markets. We find broker-clients in the Canadian mortgage market are observationally different from branch-clients. They finance larger loans with more leverage and longer amortization. We build and estimate a model of mortgage demand to disentangle three...

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature – the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review...

Dun's Review began publishing monthly data on bankruptcies by branch of business during the 1890s. Those series evolved through many iterations. This essay reconstructs the series from 1895 to 1935 and discusses how it can be used for economic analysis