The European Union (EU) is about to achieve its dream of creating a monetary union. The road to monetary union started at the Hague Summit of 1969, which inspired the Werner Report of 1970 and many other reports and proposals, and led all the way to the Accord that the European heads of state...

The market for international organizations (IOs) has changed radically in the past fifty years, partly in response to te success these organizations have achieved. This paper focuses on one important organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with the...

We test the hypothesis that higher economic development is associated with lower trade costs. Using different methods to control for multilateral resistance, we apply two alternative gravity equations (GE). In the first, we estimate total exports from 103 Italian provinces to 188 countries over...

We test the relationship between size of regional trade agreement (RTA) and regional trade bias using a gravity equation on a large sample of 143 countries for the period 1980-2003. We find that regional trade bias declines with the size of the club and that three of the four expanding RTAs have...