This paper investigates the changing nature of economic integration in China. Specifically, we consider business-cycle synchronization (correlation of demand and supply shocks) among Chinese provinces during the period 1955-2007. We find that the symmetry of supply shocks has declined after the...

Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....

We explore the role of the transfers that UK regions received from the European structural and cohesion funds, as well as other economic and social factors, in determining the support for the Remain vote in the Brexit referendum, and that past European transfers have played virtually no role in...

This article investigates how the legacy of colonization shapes the impact of inward FDI on employment in the Chinese labor market. The analysis utilizes provincial panel on overall employment and employment in the service sector during 2006-15. We find that inward FDI significantly promotes...

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We...

We investigate the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks in Korea. We compare results obtained with two alternative approaches: the narrative approach and Structural Vector-Autoregressive model (SVAR). We propose a new methodology for identifying exogenous and unexpected fiscal...

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple...

We investigate the relationship between unemployment and growth in China. We find considerable differences in the nature of this relationship across Chinese regions. We argue that this may reflect the different progress in transition across regions, in line with the Aghion-Blanchard model of...

We investigate the short-term effects of fiscal adjustment on economic activity in 20 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009. We compare two approaches: the traditional approach based on changes in cyclically adjusted primary balance (CAPB) and the narrative approach based on historical records....

We revisit the relationship between financial development and economic growth in a panel of 52 middle income countries over the 1980-2008 period, using pooled mean group estimator in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting. We show that financial development does not have a linear positive...