At the 25th anniversary of the Maastricht Treaty, this paper reviews the merits of introducing a safe sovereign asset for the eurozone. The triple euro area crisis showed the costly consequences of ignoring the "safety trilemma". Keeping a national safe sovereign asset (the German bund) as the...

This paper addresses the lack of connection between theory and empirics in most export diversification - economic development studies. We provide a Ricardian-based theoretical explanation of countries' relative export variety as a function of the level of technology and country size assessed...

We propose an empirical analysis of testing the relationship between gender wage gap and economic growth. The study takes into account 12 manufacturing sectors in 18 OECD countries for the period between 1970 and 2005.We use industrial statistics (EU KLEMS, 2008) on female and male wages that...

Extraordinary spread of new information and communication (ICTs) technologies has been recognized worldwide. ICTs are broadly perceived as tools facilitating economic growth and development, especially in economically backward countries. They are relatively easy and cheap to adopt, require...

When is it optimal for a government to default on its legal repayment oblig- ations? We answer this question for a small open economy with domestic production risk in which the government optimally finances itself by issuing non-contingent debt. We show that Ramsey optimal policies occasionally...

This paper is a first attempt to include credit derivatives in international macrofinancial analysis. We document that gross credit derivatives holdings map to bilateral portfolio investment linkages. On a net basis, our results suggest an asymmetry between sectors and between net buyers and net...