How do the number of trade partners and the concentration of trade among partners affect the economic growth of a country? We refer to these characteristics as the structure of trade, and explore this question empirically in this study. We find that the structure of trade, independently of the...

We combine data on international trade linkages with network methods to examine the global trading system as an interdependent complex network. We map the topology of the international trade network, and suggest new network-based measures of international economic integration, at both a global...

"We combine data on international trade linkages with a network approach to map the global trading system as an interdependent complex network. This enables us to obtain indicators of how well connected a country is into the global trading system. We use these network-based measures of...

We map the relationship between products in global trade and the products a country exports as a network to devise a measure of the density of links between the products in a country's export basket and a measure of network proximity from a country's export basket to products that a country does...

We study how monetary, exchange-rate and other institutional arrangements are associated with policy makers' preferences for inflation stability. We argue that focusing on policy intentions, represented by these preferences, constitutes a better way of evaluating policy behavior, instead of...

We generate data on the relative preferences of policy makers for inflation and output stability and reexamine how policy makers and political parties behave for 24 countries by using this new approach. This behavior is essential in both the partisan cycle models and the opportunistic political...

The legal and economic literatures overwhelmingly support the notion that regulatory compliance is always less in the presence of corruption. This paper departs from those literatures and shows that, whenever public officials are paid fixed wages, an increase in corruption may actually foster...