It has been emphasized that international promotion activities such as state visits or the presence of embassies, consulates and export promotion agencies help foster trade when there are search costs and/or uncertainty. In this paper we try to disentangle the differential effect that foreign...

We face uncertainty in most economic decisions we take. This is particularly true in the case of a firm entering a foreign market where there is uncertainty about the size of the market, the distribution channels, the adequacy of the firm's product to local tastes, etc. Despite its obvious...

International Macroeconomics has long sought an explanation for current account fluctuations that matches the data. The approaches have typically focused on better models and new macroeconomic variables. We demonstrate the limitations of this approach by showing that idiosyncratic shocks are an...

One of the most striking features of the world economy is that wealthy countries are clustered together. This paper theoretically and empirically explains a mechanism for this clustering by extending the Acemoglu and Ventura model so that it takes real geography into account. Countries close to...

Building upon the general consensus that macroeconomic volatility reduces economic growth since Ramey and Ramey (1995), we empirically show - for over 100 countries during the period 1978-2002 - that a moderate degree of volatility can actually be growth-enhancing while very high volatility is...