Borders and the Constraints on Globalization

National borders are a big hurdle to the expansion of the open economy. Integration today remains imperfect because national borders translate into trading costs, including differences in monetary regimes. Political borders shelter many goods and services from external competition and, consequently, represent a critical exogenous force in the integration process. Borders are thicker for the small countries than the large countries. Regional trade arrangements have softened or, in some cases, pushed outward national borders, but in the process new borders have emerged. Borders affect also finance and monies. While the speed of financial integration suggests currency consolidation and a decline in the ratio of independent monies to sovereign nations, the formation of multilateral monetary unions pushes the ratio towards unity.borders, integration, gravity model, RTA, monetary unions

The Evolutionary Chain of International Financial Centers

Financial products are unstandardized and subject to a great deal of uncertainty. They tend to concentrate geographically because of the reduction in information costs resulting from close contacts. Concentration leads to economies of scale and encourages external economies. Great financial centers enjoy a high degree of persistence but are not immune from decline and eventual demise. Yet, their achievements are passed along in a an evolutionary manner. In revisiting the historical record of seven international financial centers – Florence, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London and New York — the paper finds evidence of a long evolutionary chain of banking and finance. As to the present and the future, the forces of integration are likely to give an additional boost to the persistence of international financial centers.banking, evolution, finance, money, Genoa, Venice, Florence, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, New York

Banks’ Great Bailout of 2008-2009

This paper examines government policies aimed at rescuing banks from the effects of the financial crisis of 2007-2009. To delimit the scope of the analysis, we concentrate on the fiscal side of interventions and ignore, by design, the monetary policy reaction to the crisis. The policy response to the subprime crisis started in earnest after Lehman’s failure in mid September 2008, accelerated after February 2009, and has become very large by September 2009. Governments have relied on a portfolio of intervention tools, but the biggest commitments and outlays have been in the form of debt and asset guarantees, while purchases of bad assets have been very limited. We employ event study methodology to estimate the benefits of government interventions on banks and their shareholders. Announcements directed at the banking system as a whole (general) and at specific banks (specific) were priced by the markets as cumulative abnormal rates of return over the selected window periods. General announcements tend to be associated with positive cumulative abnormal returns and specific announcements with negative ones. Our results are also sensitive to the information environment. Specific announcements tend to exert a positive impact on rates of return in the pre-crisis sub-period, when announcements are few and markets have relative confidence in the “normal” information flow. The opposite takes place in the turbulent crisis sub-period when announcements are frequent and markets mistrust the “normal” information flow. These results appear consistent with the observed reluctance of individual institutions to come forth with requests for public assistance.announcements, financial crisis, rescue plans, undercapitalization

HETEROGENEITY IN TRADE COSTS

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that higher economic development is associated with lower trade costs. Using exports from 103 Italian provinces to 188 countries over the period 1995-2004, we estimate distance elasticity, our measure of trade costs, through a gravity equation model of bilateral trade derived by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003). We use different methods to control for multilateral resistance. Results corroborate our hypothesis. We find that heterogeneity of trade costs in Italian provinces is high and that it is negatively associated with economic development.trade costs

International Trade Efficiency, the Gravity Equation, and the Stochastic Frontier

In the gravity equation of international trade, bilateral trade flows are regressed on trading partners’ income and the distance that separates them along with other variables. This widely used equation is traditionally estimated by the ordinary least squares method. We employ an alternative technique of stochastic frontier estimation to assess the potential bilateral trade flows from the same gravity equation. Countries are shown to have low efficiencies in their international trade as the predicted trade from frontier estimation is generally far greater than actual trade. Trade efficiencies are computed and ranked for individual countries, ten geographical regions, and eleven regional trade agreements.efficiency coefficients, OLS residuals, trade gravity, trade potentials

Geography of Trade Costs in Italy

We show that economic development is associated with lower trade costs by applying a gravity equation to exports from 103 Italian provinces to 188 countries over the period 1995-2004. Italian provinces are heterogeneous with respect to trade costs.trade costs, distance, heterogeneity, gravity equation

The Banking Bailout of the Subprime Crisis: Big Commitments and Small Effects?

This paper examines government policies aimed at rescuing banks from the effects of the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Governments responded to the crisis by guaranteeing bank assets and liabilities and by injecting fresh capital into troubled institutions. We employ event study methodology to estimate the benefits of government interventions on banks. Announcements directed at the banking system as a whole were associated with positive cumulative abnormal returns whereas announcements directed at specific banks with negative ones. The effects of foreign general announcements spilled over across different areas and were perceived by home-country banks as subsidies boosting the competitive advantage of foreign banks. Specific announcements produced effects that were consistent with other banks being crowded out for government resources. Multiple specific announcements exacerbated the extent of banks’ moral hazard. Results were sensitive to the information environment. Findings are consistent with the hypothesis that individual institutions were reluctant to seek public assistance.announcement, bank, event study, financial crisis, rescue plan

Resurrecting Keynes to Revamp the International Monetary System

There is a broad consensus that the current, large U.S. current-account deficits financed with foreign capital inflows at low interest rates cannot continue forever; there is much less consensus on when the system is likely to end and how badly it will end. The paper resurrects the basic principles of the plan Keynes wrote for the Bretton Woods Conference to propose an alternative to the current international monetary system. We argue for the creation of a supranational bank money that would coexist along side national currencies and for the establishment of a new international clearing union. The new international money would be created against domestic earning assets of the Fed and the ECB. In addition to recording credit and debit entries of the supranational bank money, the new agency would determine the size of quotas, the size and time length of overdrafts, and the coordination of monetary policies. The substitution of supranational bank money for dollars would harden the external constraint of the United States and resolve the n-1 redundancy problem.Keynes Plan, external imbalances, exchange rates, international monetary system, key currency, supranational bank money

International Terrorism, International Trade, and Borders

This paper shows that terrorism reduces bilateral trade flows, in real terms, by raising trading costs and hardening borders. Countries sharing a common land border and suffering from terrorism trade much less than neighboring or distant countries that are free of terrorism. The impact of terrorism on bilateral trade declines as distance between trading partners increases. This result suggests that terrorism redirects some trade from close to more distant countries. Our findings are robust in the presence of a variety of other calamities such as natural disasters or financial crises.financial crisis, natural disaster, trade gravity model, transaction cost

Who is Running the IMF: Critical Shareholders or the Staff?

The paper deals with the principal-agent relationship at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). We argue that residual control rights at the IMF are vested with the critical shareholders, the countries included in the G-7. This group controls vast financial resources and enjoys the highest regulatory and governance standards among IMF members. Imperfect incentives for monitoring and the complexity of the issues give staff and management a degree of autonomy. The evidence marshalled in the paper suggests that critical shareholders are in charge on those issues they care most about, leaving discretion to staff and management on peripheral issues.IMF, G-7, principal-agent relationship, critical shareholder, staff autonomy