Trade finance has received special attention during the financial crisis as one of the potential culprits for the great trade collapse. Several researchers have used micro level data to establish the link between trade finance and trade, especially so during the financial crisis, and have found...

Policy commitment and credibility are important for inducing agents to make costly, irreversible investments. Policy uncertainty can delay investment and reduce the response to policy change. I provide theoretical and novel quantitative evidence for these effects by focusing on trade policy, a...

The paper discusses the efforts deployed by various players, mainly multilateral financial institutions, regional development banks, export credit agencies, to mobilize greater flows of trade finance for developing countries, with a view to help them integrate in world trade. As an institution...

Economic projections for the world economy, particularly in relation to the construction of Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) baselines, are generally rather conservative and take scant account of the wide range of possible evolutions authorized by the underlying economic mechanisms...

Without transparency, trade agreements are just words on paper. Transparency as disclosure allows economic actors and trading partners to see how rules are implanted; transparency in decision-making ensures fairness and peer review. In the first section of this paper, I discuss the logic of...

I study trade-induced transitional dynamics by estimating a structural dynamic equilibrium model of the Brazilian labor market. The model features a multi-sector economy with overlapping generations, heterogeneous workers, endogenous accumulation of sector-specific experience and costly...

As governments increasingly adopt policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, concern has grown on two fronts. First, carbon leakage can occur when mitigation policies are not the same across countries and producers seek to locate in jurisdictions where production costs are least affected by...

This paper assembles detailed information about the intellectual property (IP) provisions contained in 194 active regional trade agreements (RTAs) that had been notified to the WTO by November 2010. IP provisions in RTAs have been the subject of much study and commentary. However, much of this...

The paper studies empirically the fiscal policy instruments by which governments try to influence election outcomes in 24 developing countries for the 1973-1992 period. The study finds that the main vehicle for expansionary fiscal policies around elections is increasing public expenditure rather...

This paper analyzes the provisions of the new Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), drawing insights from trade theory and recent developments in the economics of information and law. A central conclusion is that in a world where imperfectly informed procurers purchase from imperfectly...