Does reduced trade tax revenue affect government spending patterns?

Many skeptics of trade liberalization in the developing world argue that lowering trade taxes can cause significant fiscal pressures in countries particularly reliant on these taxes and result in a reallocation of resources away from important development goals. This paper evaluates whether there is evidence that central governments systematically change the composition of spending priorities in the wake of lowered trade tax revenues as a share of total government revenues. We find no systematic evidence for this concern in a sample of 51 developing countries for the 1991 through 2005 period.     

The productive effect of transport infrastructures: does road transport liberalization matter?

In this paper we analyze the impact of motorway networks on production for a panel of twenty one manufacturing and service sectors of eleven EU countries observed over the period 1980–2003. In particular, we analyze if the degree of regulation of the road transport sector affects the link between productivity and motorway infrastructures. Overall results suggest that output elasticity with respect to motorway is found to be lower for countries characterised by a high degree of entry barriers in the road transport sector. This result is found to be more evident for industries which rely more heavily on transport services.     

Who pushes the discussion on wind energy? An analysis of self-reposting behaviour on Twitter

Quality & Quantity - Discussions about wind energy and its environmental impact take place routinely over Twitter. Twitterers with a strong interest in the matter may also retweet their own...     

Getting beyond carry trade: What makes a safe haven currency?

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the fundamentals of safe haven currencies, which are those currencies that provide an hedge for a reference portfolio of risky assets, conditional on shocks to global risk aversion. We analyse a large panel of 52 currencies in advanced and emerging countries over almost 25 years of data. We find that only a few factors are robustly associated to a safe haven status, most notably the net foreign asset position, an indicator of external vulnerability, and whether currencies have been a good hedge in the past. In addition, the currencies of large, less financially open economies are a good hedge against global risk aversion shocks. By contrast, the level of the interest rate spread vs. the US is significant only during the latest crisis. Finally, we find some evidence of non-linearity as the importance of the fundamentals is stronger during crisis times.