The paper departs from the perception that trade in services in general and developing countries' exports in services in particular are dynamic segments of world trade. Both total trade data as well as US import trade figures do not support this perception. Success episodes such as the recent...

Although it is well known that Markov process theory, frequently applied in the literature on income convergence, imposes some very restrictive assumptions upon the data generating process, these assumptions have generally been taken for granted so far. The present paper proposes, resp. recalls...

This paper presents an approach to measuring the values of time cost for freight transportation, and examines its applicability through empirical analysis. We develop the method based on the hedonic approach by explicitly formulating how transport time is determined as market outcome. In the...

During its early and formative years, the U.S. tire industry was heavily concentrated around Akron, Ohio. We test the extent to which entrants in Ohio were attracted to the Akron area by agglomeration benefits, contributing to a self-reinforcing process envisioned in many modern theories of...

The paper constructs credit shocks using data and the solution to a monetary business cycle model. The model extends the standard stochastic cash-in-advance economy by including the production of credit that serves as an alternative to money in exchange. Shocks to goods productivity, money, and...

Previous assessments of nominal exchange rate determination have focused upon a narrow set of models typically of the 1970's vintage, including monetary and portfolio balance models. In this paper we re-assess the in-sample fit and out-of-sample prediction of a wider set of models that have been...

This paper studies the business cycle in Germany using the HP-filter (Hodrick/Prescott (1997)) to isolate the cyclical component. A two-country International Business Cycle model in line with Baxter/Crucini (1995) is built to explain these facts. The combination of GHH-preferences with taste...

The paper considers theoretical and empirical evidence on the impact of standards-based school reform. Our theoretical synthesis distinguishes between sorting and incentive effects of high standards, and spells out the potential tradeoffs and complementarities between enhancing efficiency and...

Employers' standard practice of including legal spouses in health insurance is likely to place people in unmarried couples at a significant disadvantage for obtaining coverage. Data from married and unmarried couples in the Current Population Survey confirm that people with unmarried partners...