Financial stability is an important policy objective since crises are associated with big economic, social, and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing 'sudden stops' in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to the...

Was die Weltwirtschaft angeht, - bemerkt Tucholsky bissig in seinem Essay "Kurzer Abriß der Nationalökonomie" in den zwanziger Jahren - "so ist sie verflochten". Und er fährt fort: "Eine wichtige Rolle im Handel spielt der Export. Export ist, wenn die anderen kaufen sollen, was wir nicht...

We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the uncertainty shock idea of Bloom (2009) with a model of international trade, extending the idea to the open economy. Firms import intermediate inputs from home or...

Die weltwirtschaftliche Entwicklung war in den letzten Jahrzehnten gekennzeichnet von einer rapide voranschreitenden Intensivierung des Welthandels und der internationalen Arbeitsteilung. Bedingt durch die expansive Entwicklung des internationalen Warenhandels zählte die Frachtschifffahrt in...

We use newly collected data on trade and production in 178 countries to infer estimates of trade costs in agriculture and manufactured goods for the 1995-2010 period. The data show that trade costs are strongly declining in per capita income. Moreover, the rate of change of trade costs is...

Over the last decade, European Union members have experienced a dramatic increase in imports. This increase was accompanied by a strong growth in the number of imported goods and trading partners, indicating positive welfare gains for consumers via an extended set of consumption possibilities,...

There is strong empirical evidence that countries with lower per capita income tend to have smaller trade volumes even after controlling for aggregate income. Furthermore, poorer countries do not just trade less, but have a lower number of trading partners. In this paper, I construct and...

What insights can be gained from bringing the theory of the firm to the global economy? I discuss several new features of the world economy that can be explained by incorporating the theory of the firm into the theory of international trade. Among the new features I discuss are the move to...

The cost-effectiveness of unilateral emission abatement can be seriously hampered by emission leakage. We assess three widely-discussed proposals for leakage reduction targeted at energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries: border tax adjustments, output-based allocation and industry...