This paper improves upon the recently developed literature on exits from fixed exchange rate regimes in three ways: 1) It allows for two indicators for post-exit macroeconomic conditions, the change in the exchange rate and the change in the output gap; 2) it tests whether the distinction...

Arab countries have been performing very poorly in attracting FDI inflows relative to other developing countries since the early 1990s. Arab countries might hence be missing out on growth and development, if FDI is associated with positive externalities. The recent empirical literature on FDI...

This paper constitutes an attempt to reframe and eventually deflate the ongoing “compliance-vs.-rebalancing” debate which has permeated WTO scholarship for the last 10 years. At face value, this controversy circles around object and purpose of WTO enforcement and the legal nature of dispute...

The January 2001 proposal for a New Basel Capital Accord has renewed the interest in obtaining default probabilities for various types of borrowers. This paper uses a panel logit model to estimate default probabilities of 78 emerging market countries (1984-97) as a function of a set of economic...

See front page of paper

This paper uses highly disaggregated trade data to investigate geographic and product diversification patterns across a group of developing nations for the period from 1990 to 2005. The econometric investigation shows that the gravity equation fits the observed differences in diversification...

The paper investigates how Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) affect the range of goods exported by a nation. We use the Melitz model and highly dis-aggregated data on Euro-Mediterranean trade to measure the effect of preferential trade liberalization on the range of traded products. By...

The paper explains why institutions matter for a deep integration process, as illustrated by the liberalization of Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs) in Europe. We argue that deep trade liberalization requires supranational institutions of deeper integration that permit enforcement, surveillance, and...

In a micro-founded framework in line with the new open economy macroeconomics, the paper shows that the monetary policies of the domestic and foreign CB are strategic complements and the presence of an inflation-averse central bank (CB) abroad always increases employment in the home country. We...

This paper studies the impact of trade costs reduction on geographical concentration in the presence of firm heterogeneity and overhead type of export fixed costs. Firm heterogeneity with the export fixed costs hampers full agglomeration through weakening the forward and backward linkages and...