One side-effect of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 was the resurgence of a debate over exchange rates. The conventional wisdom dictates that real-exchange rate adjustments are needed in order to bring about changes in trade balances across countries. However, the literature on the effect...

The Political Economy of Protection explains why countries, especially developing countries, change their trade policies over the course of history. It does so through an interdisciplinary approach, which borrows analyses from both political science and economics. While the central focus of this...

The literature on the relationship between economic diversification and development has grown rapidly in recent years, partly due to the surprising finding that diversification rises with gross domestic product per capita up to a certain point. Export diversification along the extensive margin...

Informal employment is ubiquitous in developing countries, but few studies have estimated workers' switching costs between informal and formal employment. This paper builds on the empirical literature grounded in discrete choice models to estimate these costs. The results suggest that...

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity (TFP) in Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000–2008. The Brazilian experience is instructive as it is a case of an economy that expanded aggregate exports significantly, but with stagnant aggregate TFP...