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...

The Gold Pool (1961-1968) was one of the most ambitious cases of central bank cooperation in history. Major central banks pooled interventions - sharing profits and losses - to stabilize the dollar price of gold. Why did it collapse? From at least 1964, the fate of the Pool was in fact tied to...

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...

While openness to trade is a well-recognized hallmark of many successful emerging market economies known as "growth miracles," another component of the growth model is a leapfrogging strategy - the use of policies to guide the industrial structural transformation ahead of a country's factor...

By thoroughly controlling for the country covariates, through a combination of matched sampling techniques with fixed-effect panel regression models, the analyses arrive at robust results across the various model specifications. First, national pharmaceutical patent protection alone does not...

This paper studies the barriers to the diffusion of development across countries over the very long-run. We find that genetic distance, a measure associated with the amount of time elapsed since two populations' last common ancestors, bears a statistically and economically significant...

This paper presents a new data set on the diffusion of about 115 technologies in over 150 countries over the last 200 years. We use this comprehensive data set to uncover general patterns of technology diffusion. Our main 5 findings are as follows: (i) Once the intensive margin is measured,...