We investigate the relationships among trade, foreign direct investment and the real exchange rate between a set of Southeast Asian and Latin American countries and both the United States and Japan. Foreign direct investment by both Japan and the United States to the Southeast Asian countries in...

A classic argument for a fixed exchange rate is its promotion of trade. Empirical support for this, however, is mixed. While one branch of research consistently shows a small negative effect of exchange rate volatility on trade, another, more recent, branch presents evidence of a large positive...

We show a statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful decline in the intelligence of Marine Officers from 1980 to 2014 as measured by their scores on the General Classification Test (GCT) which has been shown to be a good predictor of success in the military. This contrasts with the...

Countries choose different strategies when responding to crises. An important challenge in assessing the impact of these policies is selection bias with respect to relatively time-invariant country characteristics, as well as time-varying values of outcome variables and other policy choices....

We present and describe a new dataset of capital control restrictions on both inflows and outflows of ten categories of assets for 100 countries over the period 1995 to 2013. Building on the data first presented in Martin Schindler (2009), and other datasets based on the analysis of the IMF's...

A central result in international macroeconomics is that a government cannot simultaneously opt for open financial markets, fixed exchange rates, and monetary autonomy; rather, it is constrained to choosing no more than two of these three. In the wake of the Great Recession, however, there has...

Do national borders and ethnicity contribute to market segmentation between and within countries? This paper uses unique and high-frequency data on narrowly-defined goods to gauge the extent to which a national border impedes trade between developing countries (Niger and Nigeria). Using a...

The impermanence of fixed exchange rates has become a stylized fact in international finance. The combination of a view that pegs do not really peg with the "fear of floating" view that floats do not really float generates the conclusion that exchange rate regimes are, in practice, unimportant...

The perceptions of a central bank's inflation aversion may reflect institutional structure or, more dynamically, the history of its policy decisions. In this paper, we present a novel empirical framework that uses high frequency data to test for persistent variation in market perceptions of...

This paper reviews the literature on the effects of capital account liberalization and stock market liberalization on economic growth. The various empirical measures used to gauge the presence of controls on capital account transactions as well as indicators of stock market liberalization are...