This paper presents statistical analysis supporting stylized facts about sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). It discusses the forces leading to the growth of SWFs, including the role of fuel exports and ongoing current account surpluses, and large hoarding of international reserves. It analyzes the...

This paper clarifies one of the puzzling results of the economic growth literature: the impact of military expenditure is frequently found to be non-significant or negative, yet most countries spend a large fraction of their GDP on defense and the military. We start by empirical evaluation of...

This paper studies the empirical and theoretical association between the duration of a pegged exchange rate and the cost experienced upon exiting the regime. We confirm empirically that exits from pegged exchange rate regimes during the past two decades have often been accompanied by crises, the...

This paper investigates the changing pattern and efficacy of sterilization within emerging market countries as they liberalize markets and integrate with the world economy. We estimate the marginal propensity to sterilize foreign asset accumulation associated with net balance of payments...

Does leaving a currency union reduce international trade? We answer this question using a large annual panel data set covering 217 countries from 1948 through 1997. During this sample a large number of countries left currency unions; they experienced economically and statistically significant...

This paper analyzes how a model where goods are endogenously nontraded can help explain the relationship between the current account and real exchange rate fluctuations. We formulate a small open economy two-period model in which goods switch endogenously between being traded or nontraded. The...

Conventional wisdom in economic history suggests that conflict between countries can be enormously disruptive of economic activity, especially international trade. Yet nothing is known empirically about these effects in large samples. We study the effects of war on bilateral trade for almost all...

This paper advocates a new way of thinking about goods trade in an open economy macro model. It develops a simple method for analyzing trade costs that are heterogeneous among a continuum of goods, and it explores how these costs determine the endogenous decision by a seller of whether to trade...

Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the “Balassa-Samuelson” effect. But looking back fifty years, or more, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is...