A potential vehicle to move capital unrecorded out of a country is the misinvoicing of international trade transactions. Exporters may understate the export revenue on their invoices and importers may overstate import expenditures, while their trading partners are instructed to deposit the...

A country's visa policies are widely assumed to have economic consequences. In this short paper, I examine the effect of the ease with which a country's citizens can enter foreign countries on international trade. Using a specification of the gravity model that avoids the endogeneity problems...

Recent estimates suggest that developing countries lose about 1 trillion US dollars each year due to illicit financial flows. This paper reviews the empirical methodology that underlies those estimates. Various critical aspects of the analytical approach are highlighted, focusing in particular...

Politicians travel a lot, for various reasons. The types of trips to foreign countries range, for instance, from a formal, highly -orchestrated, multi -day visit to brief logistical stop -overs, from the regular exchange of information during official talks in a working environment to ceremonial...

This paper studies the allocation of the functions and responsibilities of prudential supervision on public authorities, including the central bank. In particular, it is argued that there are interdependencies in the design of institutions; political decisions on the supervisory structure are...

In diesem kurzen Aufsatz werden die Kosten des Terrors für den internationalen Handel diskutiert. Unstrittig ist, dass Unsicherheit und Gewalt die wirtschaftliche Aktivität lähmen können. Ob auch terroristische Aktionen, die häufig isolierte Ereignisse darstellen, selten auf direkte...

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on international trade varies along several dimensions, including the type of product, the size of firm and over time. In this note, I provide evidence of systematic variation in the trade response to the pandemic along another, previously unexplored...

We examine the extent to which financial sanctions imposed by Germany through its European Union and United Nations commitments cause collateral damage on Germany's trade in goods and services. Financial sanctions reduce Germany's inflows and outflows of financial assets, as well as imports and...

This paper estimates the exporter premium in bank lending. We examine credit relationships in Germany, covering all loans of more than 1.5 million euro over the period from 2005 to 2010. Having controlled for a wide range of other firm and bank characteristics, our results indicate that...

Does exchange rate variability affect the speed of external adjustment? We study bilateral trade balances for a sample of 18 European countries over the period from 1948 through 2008. We find that, with the introduction of the euro, trade imbalances among euro area members widened considerably,...