Economists have long debated the relationship of bank credit to the business cycle. The attribution of economic cycles to the "inherent instability" of fractional-reserve banking has been advanced not only by Austrian scholars in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, but also by a number of...

This paper aims to determine the role of EU in Turkey's trade flows by using the gravity model. It also aims to test whether the Customs Union (of EU) that Turkey entered in 1996 made a deviation in Turkey's trade flows. Regional trade agreements on the one hand create new trade opportunities...

We analyse the impact of relaxing rules of origin (ROOs) in a simple setting with heterogeneous firms that buy intermediate inputs from domestic and foreign sources. In particular, we consider the impact of switching from bilateral to diagonal cumulation when using preferences (instead of paying...

The idea of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement goes beyond the traditional concept of trade liberalization and, apart from the elimination of tariffs in trade of goods, it also includes the reduction/ removal of non-tariff barriers, the liberalization of the investment regime, the...

We examine the political economy underpinnings of import protection in general equilibrium. Starting from a dual theoretical representation of production, trade, and consumption, we map a general representation of the real economy to underlying political processes aka the political support...

The issues of zero trade observations and the validity of the log linear transformation of the gravity equation have generated a number of debates in the literature with differing claims about the most suitable estimation technique. To produce unbiased and consistent estimates for policy making,...

This paper investigates the causes of rejections of African exports at the EU border as a barrier in accessing EU markets. Our results indicate that natural geographical hurdle, poor trade-related infrastructure, inefficient border procedure and a lack of technical personnel increase the...

In this paper the authors develop an innovative 21 sector computable general equilibrium model of Armenia to assess the impact on Armenia of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU, as well as further regional or multilateral trade policy commitments. They find that a...

Melitz and Ottaviano's (2008) firm-heterogeneity model predicts that trade liberalization induces a selection process from low to high productivity firms, which translates to an industry productivity growth. A similar firms' selection effect is induced by market size. In this paper, these...