Does higher income cause democracy? Accounting for the dynamic nature and high persistence of income and democracy, we find a statistically significant positive relation between income and democracy for a postwar period sample of up to 150 countries. Our results are robust across different...

One consequence of tariff evasion is that a country’s average statutory import tariff rate deviates from the average applied tariff rate. We deliver an approach to estimate the average evasion rate in multi-country general equilibrium. We find evidence of significant average tariff evasion...

This paper estimates the impact of time zone differences between trading locations on trade costs and trade in general equilibrium. Using homogeneous bilateral trade data between US states and Canadian provinces, time zone differences are found to reduce bilateral trade by 11% on average, which...

We propose to test for spatial correlation of the disturbances using estimated residuals of the within estimator. We derive asymptotic properties of the test and present simulation evidence to show that it also works well in finite samples.

This paper estimates the effect of switching into and out of 14 different modes of exchange rate arrangements on bilateral exports between 1948 and 2001 in the world economy. Increasing the exchange rate arrangement tightness by one degree in the classification of Reinhart and Rogoff [Reinhart,...