For a very long time, the areas available for continuous long-distance trade were limited to territories the size of Braudel's Mediterranée (1949). Whatever the commercial organizations (merchants in the Roman or the Fatimid Empires, the Hanseatic League, the Florentine Companies), their trade...

This paper focuses on the impact of maritime piracy on international trade. Piracy increases the cost of international maritime transport through an increase in insecurity regarding goods deliveries. Bilateral trade flows between the main European and Asian countries over the 1999 to 2008 period...

According to recently developed models of trade with imperfect competition and heterogeneous firms, lower trade costs increase bilateral trade not only through a rise in the mean value of individual shipments (the intensive margin of trade), but also through an increase in the number of...

Intrinsically trustworthy agents never cheat. A society's willingness to trust and the quality of its institutions have their origins in the intrinsic trustworthiness of its citizens. Trustworthiness is the basis for maximizing output in economic exchange and in explaining differences in...

The instrumental variables strategy is commonly employed in empirical research. For correct inference using this econometric technique, the instruments must be perfectly exogenous and relevant. In fact, the standard t-ratio test statistic used in this context yields unreliable and often...

This paper introduces endogenous capital income tax rates as in Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe (1997), into the overlapping generations model with endogenous labor and consumption in both periods of life (e.g., Cazzavillan and Pintus, 2004). In contrast with the previous result that the existence of...

Israel’s policies regarding Lebanon have been dependent on public opinion, which is very volatile. The citizens of Israel did not favor the occupation of the security zone in South Lebanon because of the Four Mothers movement, and it influenced the government to withdraw military forces...

This research attempts a theoretical and quantitative analysis of authoritarian regimes enduring in the developing countries. We attempt computer visualization of the model developed by Acemoglu and Robinson in order to derive an empirical hypothesis easily. There is a reason for us to accept...

This document presents a Macroeconomic Consistency Model for a dollarized economy such as Ecuador. Based on a simply accounting framework that combined the social accounting matrix with the flow of funds, we integrate the different sectors of the economics through a matrix of income,...

Episodes of market crashes have fascinated economists for centuries. Although many academics, practitioners and policy makers have studied questions related to collapsing asset price bubbles, there is little consensus yet about their causes and effects. This review and essay evaluates some of...