The WTO TBT Agreement obliges governments to use international standards as a basis for regulation, yet leaves a degree of flexibility with respect to the choice of standard, and the manner of its use. This interplay between obligation and flexibility has given rise to tension in various fora of...

This paper fills a void in the issue of determinants of privatization prices by concentrating in one industry across many countries. This has not been done before, as the literature has only focused on (i) many industries in one country, (ii) a single industry in one country, and (iii) many...

This paper studies the impact of regional integration agreements (RIAs) on the location of foreign direct investment (FDI), using data on bilateral outward FDI stocks from the OECD International Direct Investment Statistics. The dataset covers FDI from 20 source countries, all of them from the...

This paper examines the effect of employment protection regulation on gross job flows in a sample of developed and developing countries. By implementing a differences-in-differences test we lessen the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country...

This paper shows that a large fraction of the variability of emerging market bond spreads is explained by the evolution of global factors such as risk appetite (as reflected in the spread of high yield corporate bonds in developed markets), global liquidity (measured by the international...

Commonly used datasets on the level of public debt provide incomplete country and period coverage. This paper presents a new dataset that includes complete series of central government debt for 89 countries over the 1991-2005 period and for seven other countries for the 1993-2005 period. The...