In November 2013, the central committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), at its third plenum, issued a Directives Paper (with 16 items and 60 prescriptions), setting out a long-term strategic compendium of China’s reform agenda, based on the principle of separation between market and...

Recently a small and growing empirical literature has attempted to analyze the role that quality plays in our understanding of trade. In particular, the recent work of Khandelwal (2010) has brought the insights of structural IO models of demand to bear into trade data. Our work builds on this...

This paper investigates the role of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) on bilateral international migration. By increasing the information on the potential destination country, RTAs may favour bilateral migration flows among member countries. Building on the gravity model for migration by Anderson...

We study how the 2004 reform of minimum wage rules in China has affected the survival, average wage, employment and productivity of local firms. To identify the causal effect of minimum wage growth, we use firm-level data for more than 160,000 manufacturing firms active in 2003 and complement...

Why have the Euro area and the US diverged since 2011 while they were highly synchronized during the recession of 2008-2009? To explain this divergence, we provide a structural interpretation of these episodes through the estimation of a business cycle model with financial frictions for both...

With the progress of information and communication technologies, the cost and efforts to remotely exchange information have drastically fallen. It has created new opportunities to leverage comparative advantages by reorganizing value chains along the geographic dimension and by reconsidering the...

In this paper, we estimate firm-level markups and test some micro-level predictions of a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous markups. Our theoretical framework is an extended version of the Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) (MO) model that features both quality and...

Central bank currency swaps (CBCS) allow central banks to provide foreign currency liquidity to the commercial banks in their jurisdictions. Since the end of 2007, these swaps have emerged as a de facto key feature of the international monetary system (IMS), with the US Federal Reserve (FED)...

This article develops a search-theoretic model of financial intermediation to study the efficiency condition of the banking sector. Competitive financial intermediation is determined by the search decisions of both households (to find adequate financial products) and banks (to attract depositors...

This paper investigates the impact of the exchange rate regime (ERR) on the cycle of capital fl ows, the private credit growth rate and the level of dollarization in emerging market economies. We consider two different panels including 12 and 22 countries over the periods 1980-2010 and...