Does trade openness systematically imply bigger governments, as proposed by Rodrik (1998)? This paper presents a novel and more refined explanation for when and why international trade may enlarge the public sector. We propose that trade openness is associated with bigger governments if (i) the...

Using a dataset of 101 countries over the 1960–2011 period, we examine the relationship between the real effective exchange rate (REER), on the one hand, and trade openness, trade balance, the terms of trade, factor productivity, and exchange rate regime, on the other one. We use new...

The argument over fiscal decentralization and carbon dioxide emission (CO2) reduction has received much attention. However, evidence to back this claim is limited. Economic theory predicts that fiscal decentralization affects environmental quality, but the specifics of this relationship are...

Does trade openness systematically imply bigger governments, as proposed by Rodrik (1998)? This paper presents a novel and more refined explanation for when and why international trade may enlarge the public sector. We propose that trade openness is associated with bigger governments if (i) the...

This paper investigates how government size influences the responses of government expenditure and economic growth to broad dollar shocks in 155 trade-heavy countries across 6 continents from 1995 to 2019. In most cases, we document that the magnitude of contractions in expenditures and economic...

Government is often considered the safe sector of an open economy that provides households with insurance against external risk exposure. Among highly integrated economies, however, households should be able to exploit common financial markets to insure themselves. In this paper we examine the...