Publications / Forthcoming Papers

Democracy and Foreign Students

CEPR Working Paper. April 2008.

American Economic Review. Forthcoming.

 

Russia’s Regions: Income Volatility, Labor Mobility and Fiscal Policy (with Goohoon Kwon, IMF)

IMF Working Paper 05/185. CEPR Discussion paper No. 5265. December 2005. 

The Economics of Transition. Forthcoming.

 

Measuring the Performance of Fiscal Policy in Russia

Emerging Markets Finance and Trade. 2007. Vol. 43(6): pp. 25-44.

 

What Happened to Asian Exports during the Crisis? (with Rupa Duttagupta).

IMF Staff Papers. Vol. 51(1): pp. 72-95. 2004.

 

Family Attachment and the Decision to Move by Race. (with Luis Ubeda).

 Journal of Urban Economics. Vol. 55: pp 478-497. 2004.

 

A Model of Multiple Equilibria in Geographic Labor Mobility. (with Luis Ubeda).

Journal of Development Economics. Vol. 73: pp. 107-123. 2004.

 

Empirical Models of Short-Term Debt and Crises: Do They Test the Multiple Equilibrium Hypothesis? (with Enrica Detragiache).

European Economic Review. Vol. 48: pp 379-389. 2004.

 

Real Effective Exchange Rate and the Constant Elasticity of Substitution Assumption (with Athanasios Vamvakidis)

Journal of International Economics. Vol. 60(2): pp 337-357. 2003.

 

Copper and the Chilean Economy, 1960-1998

Journal of Policy Reform. Vol. 5(2): pp. 115-126. 2002.

 

Does Border Enforcement Protect U.S. Workers from Illegal Immigration? (with Gordon Hanson and Raymond Robertson)

Review of Economics and Statistics. Vol. 84(1): pp 73-92. February 2002.

 

Testing the Hypothesis of Collusive Behavior among OPEC Members

Energy Economics. Vol. 23(3): pp. 339-53. May 2001.

 

Political Economy, Terms of Trade, and Border Enforcement. (with Gordon Hanson)

Canadian Journal of Economics. Vol. 34(3): pp. 612-638. August 2001.

 

Business Cycle and Human Capital Investment: Country Evidence on University Student Flow to the U.S. (with Plutarchos Sakellaris)

Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy. Issue 52(1): pp 221-56. June 2000.

 

Growth and Trade: the North Can Lose

Journal of Economic Growth. Vol. 5(2): pp 131-46. June 2000.

 

Illegal Immigration, Border Enforcement, and Relative Wages: Evidence from Apprehensions at the US-Mexico Border (with Gordon Hanson)

American Economic Review. Vol. 89(5): pp. 1337-57. December 1999.

 

Labor Market Integration, Unemployment and Transfers

Review of International Economics. Vol. 7(4): pp. 641-50. November 1999.

 

Income Distribution, Factor Endowments, and Trade Openness (with  Juan Luis Londońo and Miguel Székely)

Journal of Development Economics. Vol. 59: pp. 77-101. June 1999.

Reprinted in ABCDE-Europe/Oslo proceedings. World Bank (2004) and in

“The WTO and Poverty and Inequality” edited by Alan Winters. Edward Elgar Publishing, UK. 2006.

 

How do the skilled and the unskilled respond to regional shocks? The case of Spain. (with Paolo Mauro)

IMF Staff Papers Vol. 46(1): pp. 1-17. March 1999.

 

Investment in Education: Do Economic Volatility and Credit Constraints Matter?

Journal of Development Economics. Vol. 55: pp. 465-81. March 1998. (with Karnit Flug and Erik Wachtenheim)

 

De-industrialization and Trade

Review of International Economics. Vol. 6(3): pp. 450-60. August 1998.

  

 

 

Working Papers

 

Genetic, Transportation Costs, and Trade (with Paola Giuliano and Giovanni Tonon)

IZA Discussion Paper No. 2229. July 2006. CEPR Discussion paper No. 5807. September 2006.

(under revision for the Journal of Economic Growth)

 

Crises and Liquidity: Evidence and Interpretation (with Enrica Detragiache)

IMF Working Paper 01/2. October 2001.

 

Adjustment to Regional Shocks in Spain  (with Paolo Mauro)

IMF Working Paper 01/17. July 2002.

 

Work in Progress

 

Growing Up in a Recession  (with Paola Giuliano, UCLA)

 

 

Democracy and Reforms (with Paola Giuliano, UCLA and Prachi Mishra, IMF)

 

Abstract: Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce and limited to particular types of reforms and a small sample of countries. This paper studies the impact of democracy on reforms using a new dataset on structural reforms (covering the financial, capital and banking sectors, product, agriculture and labor markets, the public sector and trade) and a very large sample of about 150 developing and developed countries. We show that democracy has a significant impact on economic reforms. Moving from complete autocracy to democracy is associated with a 4 percent increase in liberalization. In addition, there is no evidence that countries that undergo economic reforms are more likely to be democratic. Our results are robust to the inclusion of a large variety of controls and estimation strategies.

 

 

Devaluation and Labor Mobility in an Integrated World (with Prachi Mishra, IMF)

 

Abstract: In an increasingly integrated world, workers are becoming more mobile and can respond to a depreciation of the exchange rate by migrating abroad. While a vast empirical literature considers the impact of exchange rate movements on wages through their effects on labor demand, there is scarce evidence on how such movements affect labor supply. This paper presents a new empirical strategy to identify the effect of exchange rate movements on domestic wages by using variation across countries in the degree of integration between domestic and international labor markets. We analyze how the pass-through from nominal exchange rate to wages depends on the degree of labor market integration using data from 30 countries over the period 1960-2007. In countries with lower barriers to external labor mobility (defined by countries with a large community of citizens living abroad and/or high receipt of remittances and/or with a large English-speaking population), the elasticity of domestic wages to nominal exchange rate is about 0.9 after one year. In countries with higher barriers to mobility, this elasticity is less than 0.6. Our results are robust to the inclusion of domestic and foreign prices, trade flows, foreign wages, and country and time fixed effects. These findings call for including labor mobility in macro models of external adjustment and for reconsidering the welfare effects of devaluation.

 

 

Learning Abroad and Technology Adoption (with Chris Papageorgiou, IMF)

 

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that learning abroad is a fundamental (if not necessary) factor to explain the process of technological absorption. We start by observing that using new technology requires knowledge embodied in individuals that cannot be readily acquired domestically from books or following blueprints without direct experience. We argue that movement of people (in the forms of FDI or students abroad) is a necessary condition to learn and adopt new technologies. We make our case by analyzing examples from the history of technology transfers from antiquity to present days and by using a novel database of individuals studying abroad. We also show that the adoption of major innovations was preceded by FDI and/or movement of students – in both cases movement of technology specific human capital. The paper concludes that movement of people to and from technological hubs is an important pre-condition for economic development

 

 

Determinants of Foreign Education

 

Abstract Foreign education is one of the main channels through which ideas flow across countries. However, the determinants of foreign education and especially the determinants of bilateral flows are still unclear. Using a novel dataset that includes annual data on bilateral flows from 1950 to 2003 with over 170,000 observations, I study the main determinants of foreign education in the framework of a gravity model. In addition to geographical variables, including distance and contiguity, cultural and historical ties play a large role in explaining bilateral flows. Finally, I compare the results with a standard gravity framework in trade to see the difference between the determinants of the flows of `ideas’ and the flows of goods