Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the Balassa- Samuelson effect. But looking back fifty years, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is often assumed...

The Great Depression ushered in a long era of deglobalization that lasted for many decades. An old conventional wisdom (e.g. Polanyi) argues that the common aspect of this shock across all countries, a deep depression, can explain the large and persistent global shift away from orthodox liberal...

The received view pins the adoption of labor regulation before 1914 on domestic forces. Using directed dyad-year event history analysis, we find that trade was also a pathway of diffusion. Market access served as an important instrument to encourage a level playing field. The type of trade...

We exploit the recent declassification of CIA documents and examine whether there is evidence of US power being used to influence countries' decisions regarding international trade. We measure US influence using a newly constructed annual panel of CIA interventions aimed at installing and...

This inquiry report was released on 27 May 2010. The Australian anti-dumping system, which is based on agreed WTO rules and procedures, benefits a small number of import competing firms, but imposes greater costs on the rest of the economy. <p>However, this net economic cost is likely to be very...</p>

This paper assesses the ideological arguments that sustain the belief that the private sector is more efficient than the public, which persist despite ambiguous empirical evidence. It argues that the privatization agenda rests on normative assumptions about "economic efficiency" that fail to...

This paper provides a new, uni¯ed, and °exible framework to measure and characterize convergence in prices. We formally de¯ne this notion and propose a model to represent a wide range of transition paths that converge to a common steady-state. Our framework enables the econometric measurement...

The main objective of this work is to analyze the measures implemented during the Franco dictatorship over the period 1939㈀1959 to revive the exports of cork products, which had fallen sharply since the beginning of the crisis of 1929. The first measure, implemented in 1939 and 1940, was...

The impacts of the global financial crisis, which started in 2007 and affected both developed and developing countries, were felt in not only banking and finance sectors but also people’s way of living and consumption. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the impacts of the global financial...

Countries differ considerably in terms of the price drivers pay for gasoline. This paper uses data for a large sample of countries to provide new evidence on the implications of these differences for the consumption of gasoline for road transport and the fuel economy of new vehicles. To address...