It has been suggested that countries which export in especially risky sectors will experience higher output volatility …. This paper develops a measure of the riskiness of a country's pattern of export specialization, and illustrates its … countries whose comparative advantage in the risky sectors is not too strong will diversify their export structure to insure …

surprisingly unstable: Export ranks are not persistent, and new top products and destinations replace old ones. Measurement error … of this instability: Only 20% of the variation in export growth can be explained by variation in comparative advantage … (source-by-product factors), while another 20% of the variation in export growth can be explained by variation in bilateral …

previous classification efforts is that we employ an extensive data base on market-determined parallel exchange rates. Our … 'natural' classification algorithm leads to a stark reassessment of the post-war history of exchange rate arrangements. When … the official categorization is a form of peg, roughly half the time our classification reveals the true underlying …

. Our central finding is that the US dollar scores (by a wide margin) as the world's dominant anchor currency and, by some …