infonet-economy

While currency crises have been extensively studied, the opposite phenomenon, large appreciations, has been far less researched. We fill this gap by providing an empirical exploration of historical episodes of large real exchange rate appreciations, using a sample of 28 advanced and 25 emerging market economies, with annual data going back to 1970. We focus on the impact of large…

In their celebrated contribution on credit rationing, Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) showed that the expected return to the borrower on a loan is increasing in the risk of the project it funds. In this paper, I show that their results do not necessarily carry over to the case where the agents’ preferences can be described by rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU). In particular, a…

We provide a simple model for considering the interaction between multiple legal regimes existing simultaneously within a single jurisdiction. We demonstrate that, even when the fundamental relationship between outputs of such regimes is to behave as substitutes for one another, the existence of negative externalities between the enforcement technologies can result in the withdrawal…

We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of a self-interested and unchecked ruler making decisions regarding the exploitation of a resource-rich country. This dictator makes the recursive choice between either investing domestically to live off the productivity of the country while facing the risk of being ousted, or looting the country’s riches by liquefying the resources and…

Export taxes usage has recently risen. They are widely presumed to affect trade, but the lack of data has prevented a systematic evaluation of their trade effects. Based on a new dataset of tax rates at the product level, this paper estimates the distortionary trade effects of export taxes. The results, which are based on theory-consistent estimation of a structural gravity model,…

Community Driven Development (CDD) programs are an extremely important component of the World Bank’s portfolio in the developing world, representing close to $7 billion in 2003, yet solid empirical evidence on their impact is relatively scarce, especially for Subsaharan Africa. In this paper, we consider the impact on access to basic services, household expenditures and child…

The WTO’s predicament is a puzzle. Compared to other international organisations it is a huge success, yet the WTO is widely regarded as suffering from a deep malaise. Exhibit A is the inability to conclude a round of multilateral trade negotiations. The last one came in 1994; the current talks (the Doha Round) are in their ninth year and far from done.1 Exhibit B is that most WTO…