It is widely accepted that research in the high-tech sector is considered a key to maintain advanced economies’ competitiveness at the face of their emerging counterparts’ rising technological sophistication. Yet, the impact of research on high-tech output has never been...

This paper re-examines the impact of demographic factors on the current account balance. To this end, we develop an analytical framework that is more general than the one commonly used in the literature in three aspects. First, it accounts for the facts that the world current account balance...

Income volatility is studied as a component of economic insecurity using recent data from the Cross National Equivalence File (CNEF). Techniques from the inequality literature are applied to longitudinal household incomes and we refer to the results as measurements of income insecurity. Using...

This paper empirically examines whether and how similarity in country characteristics affects the changes in trade flows amongst member countries under a preferential trade agreement (PTA). It demonstrates that accounting for similarity in size, income and loca- tion of member countries is...

Conventional estimate of the trade diversion (TD) effect of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) tends to be much smaller than that of the trade creation (TC) effect. This paper ex- amines two sources of estimation bias of the TD effect. The first bias of TD arises from the difficulty in...

The empirical trade literature has long been puzzled by the finding of a large and non-decreasing distance coefficient in the gravity equation amid falling transportation costs over time. To shed new light on this puzzle, the recent theoretical literature shifts its focus to the differential...

This paper proposes a within estimator for three-level data, such as time-variant bilateral trade flows. The estimator helps to address the computational difficulties in estimating, for instance, the gravity model of bilateral trade that needs to control for unobserved country-pair and...

Despite recent theoretical literature highlighting the cross effects between preferential trade agreements (PTAs), like the domino effect and the competitive liberalization theory, little has been done to quantify their impact on bilateral trade flows. This paper investigates how preexisting...

Since Rose’s (2004) striking finding of negligible WTO trade effects, numerous studies have at- tempted to solve the so-called WTO puzzle. These studies adopt novel model specifications to control for potential sources of bias, but often lead to conflicting results. Multilateral...

According to Academic Ranking of World Universities, the world’s top 500 universities are owned by only 38 countries, with the US alone having 157 of them. This paper investigates the socioeconomic determinants of the wide performance gap between countries and whether the US’s dominance in...