We work with a panel of bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002, exploring the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. We are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where...

Since the mid-1980s a substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO or regional trade agreements, especially the EU. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature...

This paper evaluates the political economy and structural factors explaining the collection efficiency of the Value Added Tax [VAT]. We consider the case where the collection efficiency is determined by the probability of audit and by the penalty on underpaying. Implementation lags imply that...

This paper studies the association between the current account and real estate valuation across countries, subject to data availability [43 countries, of which 25 are OECD], during 1990 - 2005. We find robust and strong positive association between current account deficits and the appreciation...

This paper evaluates the degree to which current account patterns are explained by the variables suggested by the literature, and reflects on possible future patterns. We start with panel regressions explaining the current account of 69 countries during 1981-2006. We identify an asymmetric...

This paper studies the cross-country variation of the fiscal stimulus and the exchange rate adjustment propagated by the global crisis of 2008-9, identifying the role of economic structure in accounting for the heterogeneity of response. We find that greater de facto fiscal space prior to the...

We define the notion of 'de facto fiscal space' of a country as the outstanding public debt relative to the de facto tax base, where the latter measures the realized tax collection, averaged across several years to smooth for business cycle fluctuations. We apply this concept to account for the...

We estimate the pricing of sovereign risk for sixty countries based on fiscal space (debt/tax; deficits/tax) and other economic fundamentals over 2005-10. We measure how accurately the model predicts sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads, focusing in particular on the five countries in the...