While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I re-examine the theories put forward by La...

In this paper, we first document that two predictions of the heterogeneous firm version of the Dornbusch (1987) pricing model are confirmed in micro data on US import prices: while the rate at which a firm reacts to changes in its own cost is U-shaped in market share, the rate at which it reacts...

This paper starts by showing that in the European car industry, there exist cross-country taste differences along the product attribute dimension that signifcantly drive net trade patterns and reduce the volume of trade. Further it is shown that, after the creation of the European common market,...

This paper quantifies the effect of the government-controlled appreciation of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) vis-à-vis the USD from 2005 to 2008 on the prices charged by US producers. As the RMB during that time was pegged to a basket of currencies, the empirical strategy must account for the fact...

While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I re-examine the theories put forward by La...

What are the drivers of the large Target2 (T2) balances that have emerged in the European Monetary Union since the start of the financial crisis in 2007? This paper examines the extent to which the evolution of national T2 balances can be statistically associated with cross-border private...

The classical Armington (1969) assumption that consumption is differentiated by the location of production is often needed to match aggregate trade patterns. Also more recent findings that there are pronounced systematic patterns in the quality composition of production, trade, and consumption...

Have exogenous changes in import competition from low-wage countries (LWCs) brought about changes in inflationary pressure in Europe? This paper examines whether labor-intensive exports from Asia and other global regions have a uniform impact on producer prices in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden,...

Some observers argue that increased real integration has led to greater co-movement of prices internationally. We examine the evidence for cross-border price spillovers among economies participating in the pan-Asian cross-border production networks. Starting with country-level data, we find that...

In this paper, we examine the extent to which market structure and the way in which it affects pricing decisions of profit-maximizing firms can explain incomplete exchange rate pass-through. To this purpose, we evaluate how pass-through rates vary across trade partners and sectors depending on...