We analyze how a wealth shift to emerging countries may lead to instability in developed countries. Investors exposed to expropriation risk are willing to pay a safety premium to invest in countries with good property rights. Domestic intermediaries compete for such cheap funding by carving out...

Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows...

This paper contributes to the debate on the magnitude of exchange rate elasticities by providing a set of price and quantity elasticities for 51 advanced and emerging-market economies. Specifically, for each of these countries we report the elasticity of trade prices and trade quantities on both...

Immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variation across U.S. states for the period 2008 to 2013, I estimate the respective causal impact of immigrants on U.S....

Government interventions such as bailouts are often implemented in times of high uncertainty. Policymakers may therefore rely on information from financial markets to guide their decisions. We propose a model in which a policymaker learns from market activity and where market participants have...

Financial markets face the constant threat of cyber attacks. We develop a principal-agent model of cyber-attacking with fee-paying clients who delegate security decisions to financial platforms. We derive testable implications about clients' vulnerability to cyber attacks and about the fees...

This paper quantifies the impact of hurricanes on seaborne international trade to the United States. Using geocoded hurricane data mapped to satellite tracking data for commercial ships, we identify hurricane intersections on sea-trade routes between U.S. and foreign ports. Matching the timing...

We examine the effect of ex-post information contagion on the ex-ante level of systemic risk defined as the probability of joint bank default. Because of counterparty risk or common exposures, bad news about one bank reveals valuable information about another bank, triggering information...