The past decade has witnessed an explosion in the number of regional trade agreements. There seems to be a general, if ill-defined, belief on the part of many policymakers and academics that there is more to such agreements than the traditional gains from trade (thus the term"new regionalism")....

Using a model that distinguishes between large money center banks and smaller regional banks, this paper shows that the percentage of a country's debt held by the large banks affects the secondary market price of that country's debt: the higher the concentration of the debt, the higher the...