The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is a coordination compact. Tariff bindings illustrate a mechanism for making commitments credible. Reciprocity illustrates a means for redistributing cooperative gains. The Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) principle illustrates an attempt to keep...

The U.S. dollar holds a dominant place in the invoicing of international trade, along two complementary dimensions. First, most U.S. exports and imports invoiced in dollars. Second, trade flows that do not involve the United States are also substantially invoiced in dollars, an aspect that has...

In this paper we investigate relationships between trade, wages, and the rewards to skill for U.S. workers during the period 1981 - 92. We measure U.S. trade flows with three groups of trading partners -- industrial countries, newly industrial countries, and primary producers -- and we estimate...

We examine the role of non-economic partnerships in promoting international economic exchange. Since far-sighted countries are more willing to join costly international partnerships such as environmental treaties, environmental engagement tends to encourage international lending. Countries with...

Whether governments clash in trade disputes or negotiate over trade agreements, their actions in the international arena reflect political conditions back home. Previous studies of cooperative and noncooperative trade relations have focused on governments that are immune from political pressures...

This paper discusses the profound difficulties of maintaining fixed exchange rates in a world of expanding global capital markets. Contrary to popular wisdom, industrialized-country monetary authorities easily have the resources to defend exchange parities against virtually any private...

Countries differ greatly in R&D spending, and these differences are particularly striking when comparing developed with developing countries. The paper examines the extent to which the benefits of R&D are concentrated in the investing countries. It is argued that significant benefits spill over...

We construct a model of international trade and multinational production (MP) to examine the impact of globalization on the skill premium in skill-abundant and skill-scarce countries. The key mechanisms in our framework arise from the interaction between three elements: cross-country differences...

The 1990's dealt a blow to traditional Heckscher-Ohlin analysis of the relationship between trade and income inequality, as it became clear that rising inequality in low- income countries and other features of the data were inconsistent with that model. As a result, economists moved away from...

This paper evaluates how the global financial crisis emanating from the U.S. was transmitted to emerging markets. Our focus is on the extent that the crisis caused external market pressures (EMP), and whether the absorption of the shock was mainly through exchange rate depreciation or the loss...