On the basis of an overview of theoretical and empirical studies on central banks’ independence, the paper assesses the independence of the central banks of the former USSR republics including the RF, as well as those of East European countries. An analysis of the potential existence of a...

Analysis of fundamental factors of the CBR’s exchange rate lay at the basis of this publication. The authors review papers which address problems of index construction of real effective exchange rate as well as models of evaluation of the real equilibrium exchange rate. They also analyze...

Neither simple average nor import-weighted average tariff indexes are ideal measures of tariff barriers. In this paper, we propose a generalized trade restrictiveness index (GTRI) that extends Feenstra’s (1995) tariff restrictiveness index (TRI) by relaxing the crucial assumption of a small...

We generalize the notions of user equilibrium, system optimum and price of anarchy to non-atomic congestion games with stochastic demands. In this generalized model, we extend the two bounding methods from Roughgarden and Tardos (2004) and Correa et al. (2008) to bound the price of anarchy, and...

We develop a model of assignment games with pairwise-identity-dependent externalities. A concept of conjectural equilibrium is proposed, and the universal conjecture is shown to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the general existence of equilibrium. We then apply the solution concept...

China is believed to have gained immensely from its admission into to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. One of the direct gains comes from the lessening of deadweight loss (DWL) due to tariff reduction. Conventional measures for DWL, however, are too aggregate to capture the trade...

We provide a novel characterization of the feasible payoff set of a general two-player repeated game with unequal discounting. In particular, we show that generically the Pareto frontier shifts outwards and the feasible payoff set expands in the sense of set inclusion, as the time horizon...

We introduce a “dynamic non-equivalent utilities” (DNEU) condition and the notion of dynamic player-specific punishments for a general repeated game with unequal discounting, both naturally generalizing the stationary counterparts in Abreu et al. (1994). We show that if the DNEU condition,...

There are two strands of approaches gauging bilateral trade barriers: the gravity models and the trade intensity index. This paper integrates these two approaches by developing a new trade intensity index. This so called “gravity model adjusted trade intensity” (GMATI) index can reflect the...