In this paper, we analyse effects of EU integration on Asian countries. Since the early 1990s, it is especially the trade creation effect of monetary integration (so-called Rose effect) which is heavily debated in the literature. Recent papers seem to indicate that the Rose effect seems to be...

Feenstra and Ma (2008) develop a monopolistic competition model where firms choose their optimal product scope by balancing the profits from a new variety against the costs of “cannibalizing” sales of existing varieties. While more productive firms always have a higher market share, there is...

Changes in exchange rates have become a prominent issue in Germany and Japan - due to the enormous appreciation of the Deutschmark and the Yen. Conventional wisdom suggests that economic activity will be negatively affected if a currency is going through a phase of appreciation. The paper...

Institutional development in new and potential member countries determines the success of both the catching-up of developing European countries and the deepening of the European integration process. This paper argues that the timing of future enlargement should depend on institutional...

We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for...

This paper extends the efficiency wages/partially adaptive expectations Phillips curve, otherwise known as the price-price Phillips curve, from a closed economy context to an open economy one with both commodity trade and capital mobility. We also consider the case of a monetary union (a...

We develop a new model of trade in which educational institutions drive comparative advantage and determine the distribution of human capital within and across countries. Our framework exploits a multiplicity of sectors and the continuous support of human capital choices to demonstrate that...

The paper applies an index suggested by Jeffrey Frankel on how to measure the gap between the intensity of national versus international transactions of a country to more than 100 countries over four periods between 1990 and 2005. The gap stands for "incomplete" globalization. It is shown that...

This paper investigates the implications for international markets of the existence of retailers/wholesalers with market power. Two main results are shown. First, in the presence of buyer power trade liberalization may lead to retail market concentration. Due to this concentration retail prices...

This paper studies the concept of an international economic order, i.e. an institutional arrangement of international rules. Such rules emerge from negative experiences – historical disasters – that inflict severe hardship on people. A taxonomy for rules reducing transaction costs is...