This paper places current efforts at international economic policy coordination in historical perspective. It argues that successful cooperation is most likely in four sets of circumstances. First, when it centers on technical issues. Second, when cooperation is institutionalized - when...

This paper highlights the rare conditions leading to international cooperation, and the reasons why eliciting this cooperation may be beneficial in preventing adverse tail shocks from spiraling into global depressions. In normal times, deeper macro cooperation among countries is associated with...

Although many modern studies find large and significant effects of prior colonial status on bilateral trade, there is very little empirical research that has focused on the contemporaneous impact of empire on trade. We employ a new database of over 21,000 bilateral trade observations during the...

This paper reviews the history of bilateral trade negotiations between Taiwan and the U.S. The question posed at the outset is: does bilateralism enhance or jeopardize multilateralism? The U.S.-Taiwan experience seems to suggest a grossly negative answer. Bilateral negotiations for market...

In their striving toward development, a number of less developed countries have espoused bilateral trade as yet another policy instrument allowing them to increase their acquisition of foreign resources. This has been particularly true of the trade of India, Pakistan, and Egypt, on which some...

Economists devote too much attention to international flows of goods and services and not enough to international flows of ideas. Traditional trade flows are an imperfect substitute for flows of the underlying ideas. The simplest textbook trade model shows that a welfare-enhancing move toward...

We investigate and compare countries' export growth based on their performance at the extensive and intensive export margins. Our empirical approach is motivated by an extension to the Melitz (2003) model of heterogeneous firms in which exporters are subject to a one-time sunk cost and also a...

The Linder hypothesis states that countries of similar income per capita should trade more intensely with one another. This hypothesis has attracted substantial research over decades, but the empirical evidence has failed to provide consistent support for it. This paper shows that the reason for...