We analyze the role of economic and security considerations in bilateral trade agreements. We use the pre-World War I period to test whether trade agreements are governed by pecuniary factors, such as distance and other frictions measured by gravity covariates, or by geopolitical factors. While...

In this paper we investigate how income growth rates in one country are affected by growth rates in partner countries, testing for the importance of pairwise country links as well as characteristics of the receiving country (trade and financial open- ness, exchange rate regime, fiscal...

In the policy debate on the effectiveness of the Global Financial Safety Net, concerns have been raised that expectations of adverse effects of IMF programmes may deter countries from asking for an IMF programme when they need one, a form of "IMF stigma". We explore the existence of IMF...

We show that traditional gravity variables play a significant role in explaining trade flows related to global value chain participation. We find evidence that cooperation costs - measured by linguistic and geographical proximity - are more relevant for trade that reflects cross-border...

International trade in manufacturing goods has risen strongly over the past decades, contributing to the expansion of global value chains (GVCs). This paper studies how two factors contributed to this rise since 1970: (i) declining "border effects" that are arguably related to the ICT revolution...

Based on a literature review, this paper investigates the reasons why broad money demand has usually been found to be more stable in the euro area than in other large economies. The paper concludes that there are three main explanations for this fact. First, in some countries outside the euro...

This paper tests whether the proposition that globalisation has led to greater sensitivity of domestic inflation to the global output gap (the global output gap hypothesisʺ) holds for the euro area. The empirical analysis uses quarterly data over the period 1979-2003. Measures of the global...

We investigate the determinants of bilateral international equity and bond portfolio reallocation across a large cross section of countries over the 1997 to 2001 period. We first argue that financial integration is not a global phenomenon, as equity and bond home biases declined significantly...

This paper explores implications of climate change for fiscal policy by assessing the impact of large scale extreme weather events on changes in public budgets. We apply alternative measures for large scale extreme weather events and conclude that the budgetary impact of such events ranges...

This paper investigates bond issuance of non-financial corporations in advanced economies during the period 1999-2003, attempting to understand motives for issuing in foreign currency, and determinants for the choice of currency. We consider the following influences on the currency choice when...