infonet-economy

This paper reconsiders the long term effect of fiscal policy on interest rates using a real-time dataset of macroeconomic and fiscal variables in a panel of 17 OECD countries over the period 1989-2009. We show that, after controlling for cross sectional dependence using a Factor Augmented Panel, interest rates are mostly related to global factors. Among domestic fiscal variables, the...

This paper tests the generalized Trivers Willard hypothesis, which predicts that parents with heritable traits that increase the relative reproductive success of males compared to females will have relatively more males than females. As in Kanazawa (2005) we test if taller mothers have relatively more sons in a pooled sample of Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) from 46 developing...

Height-for-age (HA) and weight-for-age (WA) of children are standard measures to study the determinants of stunting and short-term underweight. Rather than studying these indicators separately, this paper looks at their interaction and therefore at the dynamics of height and weight. Considering HA a child's health stock and WA nutritional investment, we develop an overlapping...

The emergence of the gold standard has for a long time been viewed as inevitable. Fluctuations of the gold-silver exchange rate in world markets were accused to lead to brutal and unsustainable switches of bimetallic countries’ money supplies. However, more recent work has shown that the option character of bimetallism provided a stabilizing feedback loop. Using original data, this...

In this paper we combine the tariff evasion analysis of Fisman and Wei (2004) with Rauch and Trindade’s (2002) study of Chinese trade networks. Chinese networks are known to act as trade catalysts by enforcing contracts and providing market information. As tariff evasion occurs outside the law, market information is scant and formal institutions inexistent, rendering networks the...

The Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price. This link implies that risk about tomorrow’s asset price depends on uncertainty about...

This article analyzes the economics of “badmouthing” in the context of the pre-1914 French capital market. We argue that badmouthing was a means through which racketeering journals sought to secure property rights over issuers’ reputation. We provide a theoretical study of the market setup that emerged to deal with such problems, and we test our predictions using new evidence from...

This paper investigates whether preferential trade agreements (PTA) promote exports to third nations through the expansion of the extensive margin (i.e. larger number of export goods). The analysis covers 11 South- South and South-North PTAs involving 36 countries that exported to 118 different destinations during the 5 years before and after the PTA. Using a conditional logit model...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of race-to-the-bottom unilateralism. It suggests that decades of unilateral tariff cutting in Asia‟s emerging economies have been driven by a competition to attract FDI from Japan. Using spatial econometrics, I show that tariffs on parts and components, a crucial locational determinant for Japanese firms, converged across countries...