The United States imports around 25% of its merchandise under some form of preferential trade regime. This paper examines both the origins and the consequences of U.S. trade preferences in the context of the gravity model of international trade. The main contributions of the paper are threefold....

Calculations of marginal welfare effects suggest that agricultural development has had important positive effects on national welfare, especially in developing countries. Latin American and Caribbean countries have also benefited from agricultural growth, but nonagricultural production has had...

Treating data collected pre- and post-COVID-19 as a quasi-experiment, this paper examines the importance of presumed enablers and safeguards in driving the observed expansion of digital payments and digital financial inclusion. The analysis interacts drivers of digital payment usage with a...

Covid-19. The Russian invasion of Ukraine. Commodity price volatility. The rise of global inflation and interest rates. Currency depreciations among indebted middle-income economies. And now, natural disasters. As a sequence of events, the consequences can be both tragic and long-lasting. After...

This paper investigates the impacts of job displacement on subsequent labor market outcomes, focusing on differentiated effects by educational groups and gender. The findings show that job separations caused by plant closings result in sizable and long-lasting wage reductions, with an average...

This paper employs a new global panel data set on innovation related variables to examine patterns of R&D investment across the development process. We find that R&D effort measured as a share of GDP rises with development at an increasing rate, but that several countries have experienced...

This paper examines the empirical relationships between trade structure and economic growth, particularly the influence of natural resource abundance, export concentration and intra-industry trade. We test the robustness of these relationships across proxies, control variables, and estimation...