One reason why countries service their external debts is the fear that default might lead to shrinkage of international trade. If so, then creditors should systematically lend more to countries with which they share closer trade links. We develop a simple theoretical model to capture this...

The effects of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are disputed. In this paper, we assess these effects using capital market data and an event-study approach, using a daily data set covering a thousand announcements spanning over eighty economies and a hundred RTAs over twenty recent years. We...

This paper studies the characteristics of departures from monetary unions. During the post-war period, almost seventy distinct countries or territories have left a currency union, while over sixty have remained continuously in currency unions. I compare countries leaving currency unions to those...

This Paper estimates the effect on international trade of multilateral trade agreements: the World Trade Organization (WTO), its predecessor the Generalized Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) extended from rich countries to developing...

Currency crises tend to be regional; they affect countries in geographic proximity. This suggests that patterns of international trade are important in understanding how currency crises spread, above and beyond any macroeconomic phenomena. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis. Using...

I search for a 'scale' effect in countries. I use a panel data set that includes 200 countries over forty years and link the population of a country to a host of economic and social phenomena. Using both graphical and statistical techniques, I search for an impact of size on the level of income,...

This Paper estimates the effect on international trade of three multilateral organizations intended to increase trade: 1) the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the Generalized Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); 2) the International Monetary Fund (IMF); and 3) the...

We provide the first empirical tests for financial protectionism, defined as a nationalistic change in banks’ lending behaviour, as the result of public intervention, which leads domestic banks either to lend less or at higher interest rates to foreigners. We use a bank-level panel data set...

Conventional wisdom holds that protectionism is counter-cyclic; tariffs, quotas and the like grow during recessions. While that may have been a valid description of the data before the Second World War, it is no longer accurate. In the post-war era, protectionism has not actually moved...

In contrast to earlier recessions, the monetary regimes of many small economies have not changed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. This is due in part to the fact that many small economies continue to use hard exchange rate fixes, a reasonably durable regime. However, most of the...