What explains the extreme variations in development achievement, among LDCs, and between developing and developed countries? This paper present a schematic framework for the interpretation of some influential recent contributions to the study of the majo long-run causes of comparative...

Due to the unavailability of time series data on domestic market clearing price of imports, the estimation ofnotional price and income elasticities of aggregate import demand remains a daunting task for a large number of developing countries. This paper develops a structural econometric model of...

Foreign firms face punitive duties if they do not cooperate with the US Department of Commerce (DOC) in antidumping procedures. For example, 37% of all foreign firms involved in antidumping investigations in the US chose faced “facts available” margins for the 1995-2002 period, with average...

When government borrows one dollar from domestic banking sector, how much does it reduce private credit in developing countries? There is surprisingly no reliable estimate in the literature on this. We provide robust estimates of the causal effect of government borrowing on private credit using...

Regional agreements on standards have been largely ignored by economists and blessed by multilateral trade rules. Using a constructed panel data that identifies the different types of agreements at the industry level, we find that such agreements increase the trade between participating...

This paper contributes to the debate about the relative importance of permanent versus transitory disturbances as sources of variation in output across the G-7 countries. We employ a multivariate unobserved components model to simultaneously decompose the real GDP for each of the G-7 countries...

We use a unique Chinese firm-director panel dataset and a simple assignment model to examine the matching mechanism of heterogeneous firms and politicians. Based on 36,308 detailed biographies, we identify directors that previously held bureaucratic positions and classify the rank of each...

The recent proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs) has resulted in an in- creasingly complex network of preferential trading relationships. The economics literature has generally examined the formation of FTAs as a function of the par- ticipating countries' economic characteristics alone....

This paper provides empirical evidence of an U-shaped relationship between the extent of the market (size of the relevant urban market) and the pattern of crop specialization in a village economy. We use the recent two-stage estimator developed by Lewbel (2007) and exploit heteroskedasticity for...

This paper examines the policy dilemmas and challenges faced by developing country governments when confronted with rising food prices, especially when it comes to the prices of basic foods such as rice and corn. One option for governments is to let domestic prices adjust to reflect the full...