Does "infant industry" preferential access durably boost export performance? This paper exploits significant trade policy changes in the United States (US) to address this question. The expansion of Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) products for less developed countries in 1997 and the...

What precisely were the causes and consequences of the trade wars in the 1930s? Were there perhaps deeper forces at work in reorienting global trade prior to the outbreak of World War II? And what lessons may this particular historical episode provide for the present day? To answer these...

FX trade settlement data from CLS provides the most comprehensive view of the opaque market of OTC currency trades. We use the flows of investment funds and non-financial corporates and develop trading signals where the former reflects speculative strategies, while the latter trade for liquidity...

Many economies are concerned with the future security of electricity supply. This is rooted in the necessity to decarbonise energy systems and in the nuclear phase-out. Hence, some economies, instead of investing in own domestic energy capacity, rely on energy production by their neighbours. At...

Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a...

We study the stability of trade policy arrangements under two regulatory scenarios, with/without PTAs. Unlike previous papers, we consider an extensive set of trade policy constellations and allow for unlimited farsightedness of negotiating parties. We find global free trade (GFT) to be uniquely...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

An increasing international applicability of a given type of education encourages students to invest more effort when studying. Governments, on the other hand, face an incentive to divert the provision of public education away from internationally applicable education toward country-specific...

Following Turkey’s application for EU membership in 1987, a Customs Union (CU) between Turkey and the EU, mainly covering trade in manufacturing goods and processed agricultural products, came into effect in 1995. In addition to a large agricultural sector, Turkey also specializes in the...

Despite the importance of the Bologna process for the mobility of students, and the further mobility of graduates, as well as for peace, growth and welfare in that area, nothing has been decided so far for the financing of internationally mobile students, so that the burden of that financing,...