In the beginning of the second book of his Politeia (Republic) Plato in passage 2.358e-359a-c raises the issue of the administration of justice as a means of motivating people to behave fairly regarding their relationships and when cooperating with each other because, at the end, this is...

In the 1870s and 1880s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticized Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate with the editors of The Nation over the...

In the last decades, the world economy has been undergoing a process of production reorganisation and relocation of unprecedented scale and scope. The era of ?globalisation? has been characterised by falling barriers to trade and increasing capital flows, both of speculative and investment...

In the basic model of the literature on international environmental agreements (IEAs) (Barrett 1994; Rubio and Ulph 2006) the number of signatories of selfenforcing IEAs does not exceed three, if non-positive emissions are ruled out. We extend that model by introducing a composite consumer good and...

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have increased dramatically over the last two decades. This paper analyses the role of trade costs in explaining the increase in both the number and the value of cross-border mergers and acquisitions. In particular, we distinguish horizontal and...

The unprecedented drop in international trade during the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 has mainly been analysed at the macroeconomic or sectoral level. However, exporters who are heterogeneous in terms of productivity, size or external financial dependence should be...

Global trade contracted quickly and severely during the global crisis. This paper, using a unique dataset of French firms, matching together export data with firm-level credit constraints, shows that most of the 2008-2009 trade collapse is accounted by the unprecedented demand shock and by...

We show that the composition of imports has important implications for the optimal volatility of the exchange rate. Using input-output data for 25 countries we document substantial differences in the import and non-tradable content of final demand components, and in the role played by imported...

The failure of trade economists to anticipate the extreme drop in trade post Lehman Brothers bankruptcy suggests that the behavior of trade in exceptional circumstances may still be poorly understood. This paper explores whether uncertainty shocks have explanatory power for movements in trade....

In this paper we attempt to quantify the incidence of different types of technical barriers to trade (TBTs) on trade structures between seven Central and Eastern European countries (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania) and the European Union at the...