Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...

This paper studies how comparative advantage and the political elites' endowments shape long-run performance in an economy with imperfect political institutions. In a capital-scarce economy, an autocrat catering to the needs of landowners favours openness to trade at an early stage of...

This paper presents evidence on the behavior of the Swedish real exchange rate relative to Germany under different currency regimes 1973:1-2001:4. The results suggest that the real exchange rate is cointegrated with Swedish and German productivity, which is consistent with Balassa (1964) and...

We study the evolution of the global arms trade network using a unique dataset on all international transfers of major conventional weapons over the period 1950-2007. First, we provide a careful description of the characteristics of global arms trade using tools from social network analysis....

This paper analyses the impact of the monetary regime on labour markets in a small open economy, by considering the game between large wage setters and an independent central bank in a two-sector model with potential labour mobility between sectors. Two monetary regimes are considered:...

This paper investigates the impact of inflation targeting on wage formation and unemployment using a panel of 17 OECD countries 1972-2000. Five of the countries included in the study have combined floating exchange rates with explicit inflation targets during the 1990s. Using a theoretical...

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autoc- racies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well; others such as the Latin American...

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...