Using the gravity model to examine bilateral trade patterns throughout the world. we find clear evidence of trading blocs in Europe. the Western Hemisphere, East Asia and the Pacific. In Europe, it is the EC that operates as a bloc, not including EFTA. Two EC members trade an extra 55 per cent...

Tax evasion, by its very nature, is difficult to observe. In this paper, we present a case study of tax evasion in China. The novel feature of our approach is that at a very disaggregated level of individual products, we can measure evasion relatively precisely, by comparing the values that...

This paper studies the role of insider trading in explaining cross-country differences in stock market volatility. It introduces a new measure of insider trading. The central finding is that countries with more prevalent insider trading have more volatile stock markets, even after one controls...

Does country transparency affect international portfolio investment? We examine this and related questions using some new measures of transparency and a unique micro dataset on international portfolio holdings. We distinguish between government and corporate transparency. There is clear evidence...

We develop a methodology to study whether and how a financial-sector crisis can spill over to the real economy, and apply it to the case of the ongoing subprime mortgage crisis. If there is a spillover, does it manifest itself primarily by reducing consumer confidence and consumer demand? Is...

In an environment in which bureaucratic burden and delay are exogenous, an individual firm may find bribes helpful to reduce the effective red tape it faces. The efficient grease' hypothesis asserts therefore that corruption can improve economic efficiency and that fighting bribery would be...

This paper proposes a simple model to study the relationship between domestic institutions - financial system, corporate governance, and property rights protection - and patterns of international capital flows. It studies conditions under which financial globalization can be a substitute for...

State-owned financial institutions have been proposed as a way to address market failure, but the recent literature has also highlighted their pathological problems. This paper studies the case of China for pitfalls of a state-dominated financial system, including possible segmentation of the...

This paper examines the home country bias in the goods market among OECD countries. An average country imports about two and a half times as much from itself as from an otherwise identical foreign country, after controlling for sizes of exporter and importer, their direct distance, geographic...

The paper studies the effect of the market's perceived exchange rate volatility on bid-ask spreads. The anticipated volatility is extracted from currency options data. An increase in the perceived volatility is found to widen bid-ask spreads. The direction of the effect is consistent with an...