Proper measurement and aggregation of trade costs is of paramount importance for sound academic and policy analysis of the determinants - particularly those of policy - of economic outcomes. The international trade profession has witnessed significant new developments, both on the theoretical...

The previous literature provides a highly ambiguous picture on the impact of trade and investment agreements on FDI. Most empirical studies ignore the actual content of BITs and RTAs, treating them as "black boxes", despite the diversity of investment provisions constituting the essence of these...

We focus on investor-state dispute settlement provisions contained in various, though far from all, bilateral investment treaties as a possible determinant of BIT-related effects on bilateral FDI flows. Our estimation results prove to be sensitive to the specification of these provisions as well...

Contrary to the common wisdom that asset prices are barely possible to forecast, we show that that high and low prices of equity shares are largely predictable. We propose to model them using a simple implementation of a fractional vector autoregressive model with error correction (FVECM). This...

We define risk spillover as the dependence of a given asset variance on the past covariances and variances of other assets. Building on this idea, we propose the use of a highly flexible and tractable model to forecast the volatility of an international equity portfolio. According to the risk...

Although designed to support monetary policy, two crucial aspects of the central bank framework can disconnect the monetary policy transmission: banks' access to central bank deposits and Quantitative Easing (QE). We show how both hinder the monetary policy transmission through the main...

In a regime of floating FX rates and open economies, it is important to understand the way through which FX rates, volatility, and trading volume interrelate. To uncover this, we provide a simple theoretical framework to jointly explore these factors in a multi-currency environment. Through the...