Objective--This paper estimates the healthcare expenditures associated with a disability at the individual level and their recent trends. Design--Retrospective analysis of survey data. Participants--Data from multiple years (1996 through 2004) of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) for a...

A central issue for managers or investors in portfolio management of assets is to select the assets to be included and to predict the value of the portfolio, given a variety of historical and concurrent information regarding each asset in the portfolio. There exist several criteria or models to...

In dollarized financial systems, there exists a currency mismatch risk that could lead to financial crises. Central Banks in such economies have to adjust their foreign currency policies accordingly. This paper estimates the probability of Central Bankers' intervention in the foreign currency...

In this paper, I start out with a standard political economy of trade policy model to measure the determinants of trade policy in a developing country. I carefully test the model empirically with Colombian data from 1983 to 1998 accounting for endogeneity and omitted variable bias concerns and...

A debate has been raging for centuries regarding the effects of inter-annual storage on commodity prices. Most analysts consider storage to function as a price stabilizer, while others place it at the core of an explanation of intriguing features of commodity price series, such as skewed...

Maintaining a weak real exchange rate is a widely recommended growth strategy, in part because of the success of Asian exporters, most recently China. Simulations of a simple two-sector open economy growth model based on Matsuyama (1992) suggest that a weaker real exchange rate can lead to a...

There has been a proliferation of preferential trade agreements within the last two decades. In this paper I analyze the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on external tariffs under a political economy setup. I extend the Grossman and Helpman (1995) model by determining tariff rates...

We study the channels of interstate risk sharing in Germany for the time period 1970 to 2006 following the methodology of Asdrubali et al. (1996). Their framework allows us to estimate the degree of smoothing of a shock to a state's gross domestic product by factor markets, the government...

Dollar-denominated deposits constitute a large proportion of deposits in many developing economies. This may result in currency mismatches on banks' balance sheets as is suggested by recent literature. In general, having dollar-denominated deposit and loans could increase financial fragility,...

During the last decade, inequality and poverty fell sharply in many Latin American countries; a period in which voters chose left-leaning leaders in ten countries including about half the region's population. Are these two developments related? Using data for 18 Latin American countries and...