Seaports have historically played a key role in facilitating trade and growth. This paper is the first attempt in the literature to analyse the formation of Chinese seaport cities and the dynamics that drives it. First, we aim to identify theoretically the emergence of urbanized seaports with...

This paper develops and estimates an open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of the Hong Kong economy. The model features short-run price rigidities generated by monopolistic competition and staggered reoptimization. We devote special attention to asset prices and wealth...

This paper estimates switching autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (SWARCH) time series models for weekly returns of nine Asian forward exchange rates. We find two regimes with different volatility levels, whereby each regime displays considerable persistence. Our analysis provides...

The role of product market reforms in achieving the objective of higher employment and growth has recently received much attention amongst academics. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the channels through which cross-market effects come about and to assess their policy relevance. The...

The design of optimal environmental policy inherits model uncertainty. We investigate the consequences in a simple linear model, where the aim of the policymaker is to stabilize the atmospheric content of carbon. We study how decision-makers' concerns about robustness alters policy using the...

Labour costs in various European countries have reached a record high in recent years. The topic of non-wage labour costs is therefore increasingly being discussed among and between the political parties because non-wage labour costs are likely to have major negative effects on employment. We...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of the East German economy at the firm level using an unbalanced panel over the transition period 1994 to 1998. We adopt a translog stochastic frontier model to estimate technical efficiency in eastern and western Germany. The results...

In an influential 2001, Journal of Economic Growth paper, Masters and McMillan find that one factor differentiating wealthy countries from poor includes annual winter frosts, which helps farmers to increase agricultural productivity and helps people to control disease, particularly malaria. This...

We present a new composite leading indicator of economic activity in mainland China, estimated using a dynamic factor model. Our leading indicator is constructed from three series: exports, a real estate climate index, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange index. These series are found to share a...