The article examines the food security implications of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture. It places the Agreement in historical context, examines its key provisions, and argues that the Agreement systematically favors industrialized country agricultural producers at the expense of farmers in...

Several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) suggest that improving well-being is achievable through trade. The free flow of goods and services internationally, which encourages efficient production and expansion of consumption, may support SDGs concerning inclusive and sustainable...

Export taxes usage has recently risen. They are widely presumed to affect trade, but the lack of data has prevented a systematic evaluation of their trade effects. Based on a new dataset of tax rates at the product level, this paper estimates the distortionary trade effects of export taxes. The...

We discuss global options for initiatives intended to ameliorate adverse impacts of visa and work permit systems used by national governments around the world. We first describe and document some of their effects, noting the relative lack of other research work on these issues. We then discuss...

One issue the literature neglects is how outsourcing stimulates trade (imports, exports and foreign direct investment), thereby affecting political relations. However, at least as far back as 1750, economic philosophers such as Baron de Montesquieu in his L?Esprit des Lois, argued, ?peace is the...

In this paper we build a model of trade in vertically differentiated products and find that income inequality can affect the demand for imports even in the presence of homothetic preferences. The empirical importance of changes in inequality on the demand for imports is then assessed by...

We develop a new set of indexes of exchange rate stability, monetary policy independence, and financial market openness as the metrics for the trilemma hypothesis. In our exploration, we take a different and more nuanced approach than the previous indexes developed by Aizenman, Chinn, and Ito...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

The paper analyzes whether the political regime of a country influences its involvement in international trade. Firstly, we develop a theoretical model that predicts that autocracies trade less than democracies. Secondly, we test the predictions of the model empirically using a panel of more...

We explore the implications of migrants' self-selection for the determination of immigration policy in a simple model where incentives and resources to migrate vary with skills. We show how self-selection determines the response of potential migrants to immigration policy changes, which is...