This work focuses on the welfare costs of exposure to shocks and uncertainty linked to trade opennes - a prominent issue in the international debate. It contributes by presenting a comprehensive review of the literature on the "destabilizing effects" of trade openness, drawing together studies...

This paper estimates and investigates the reduction, almost to elimination, of absolute poverty among working households in Britain between 1904 and 1937. To do this, it exploits two newly-digitised data sets. The paper is a statistical generalisation, to working families in the whole of...

Developing countries exhibit a more uncertain economic environment than developed countries. Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in particular, display high levels of real exchange rate uncertainty. Moreover, a succession of trade agreements among them, culminating in the creation of Mercosur in 1991...

This paper uses the nationally representative Albanian Living Standards Measurement Survey from 2005 to investigate the determinants of life satisfaction. In common with much of the existing empirical economics literature that models life satisfaction (or subjective well-being) this paper...

The existence of a large border effect is considered as one of the main puzzles of international macroeconomics. We show that the border effect is, to a large extent, an artefact of geographic concentration. In order to do so we combine international flows with intranational flows data...

Using seven Bolivian household surveys conducted between 1999 and 2007, this paper provides a different picture of poverty dynamics in Bolivia. Consistent and accurate estimates of consumption are computed and used to create poverty profiles. Challenging the previous income-based poverty trend,...

Whether to hire teachers locally on a contract basis, or via competitive examinations and training as government officials, is a major policy question in developing countries. Recruitment practices can have implications for the competence, motivation and the cost of teachers. This study relies...

This paper studies the effects property rights on credit access using a unique data set based on a Brazilian land-titling program affecting 85,000 families. The causal role of land title is isolated by comparing two communities in Osasco, where some residential units are allocated titles and...

This paper uses the cointegrated vector autoregressive (CVAR) model to assess the dynamic relationship between foreign aid inflows, public expenditure, revenue and domestic borrowing in Ethiopia. It departs from the existing literature by using a unique quarterly fiscal dataset (1993-2008) and...

Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) aim at increasing trade flows via reductions on applied tariffs and the incentives created by the difference between the applied and the most favoured nation (MFN) tariff, the preference margin. An often omitted element in PTAs evaluation is the possibility...