infonet-economy

Relative to the study of free trade agreements, customs unions (CUs) have been neglected in international law scholarship, despite the fact that by no means do they constitute a recent phenomenon. The present article aims to fill this gap by conducting a scoping analysis of the concept of customs union and identifying key issues in CU designs. The article problematizes what is…

On March 22, 2018, Trump proposed to impose tariffs on up to $50 billion of Chinese imports leading to a significant concern over the "Trade War" between the US and China. We evaluate the market responses to this event for firms in both countries, depending on their direct and indirect exposures to US-China trade. US firms that are more dependent on exports to and imports from China…

This article examines the recent evolution of the EU anti-money-laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) legislative framework, focusing on the relationship between the main international standards in the field and the newest EU legislation. It suggests that international soft law norms—in particular, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Recommendations—have had a…

Using data for advanced and emerging economies, we show that there is a negative correlation between public debt and corporate investment. Industry-level regressions show that high levels of government debt are particularly damaging for industries that need more external financial resources. Firm-level regressions show that government debt increases the sensitivity of corporate…

How do financial frictions shape the set of acquirers, how much they acquire, and how long they keep ownership? To address these questions, we develop a tractable model of M&As; whereby acquirers and targets emerge endogenously due to differences in liquidity. Financial crises lead to selection effects among acquirers that result in larger acquired stakes and more persistent…

This paper contributes to the existing literature by demonstrating that the provision of communal water supply can be effective in improving child health if the targeted population shows adequate hygiene awareness and behavior. Until now, the fast growing body of literature on water development interventions could not establish a significant effect of communal water supply on health…

Recently, a large literature has been developed from the production network models, to be applied in a diversity of fields as financial contagion, trade comovements or the aggregation of micro shocks. Thus, one theoretical implication introduced by Acemoglu et al. (2015), argue that demand-side shocks (i.e. government spending) spread through the production networks following…

This paper considers the APEC and proposed EGA agreements which grant tariff concession in favor of "green" goods. We …find that the practical signi…cance of the APEC agreement should not be overestimated as it involves modest tariff concessions over a subset of goods which are not heavily traded. Still, these agreements involve a paradigm shift to the extent that they use tariffs…

This paper documents the novel fact that Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) decrease bilateral trade imbalances as measured by conventional measure of the net export share in gross trade. While on average an RTA decreases bilateral trade imbalance by 7%, greater trade integration through a deeper RTA is associated with a reduction of up to 50% among the sample of over 160 countries…