This paper develops a model of the black market for foreign exchange in which black market currency is demanded and supplied by tirms engaged in smuggling. It is demonstrated that quotas or foreign exchange rationing are not necessary to induce the coexistence of legal and black foreign exchange markets. Variants of the model analyze the implications of capital flight, unbalanced trade, quotas,...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of exchange rate uncertainty in determining foreign direct R&D investment into the UK. We estimate an econometric model of FDI in R&D, using a panel of manufacturing industries. Our results suggest that an increase in the volatility of the euro-dollar exchange rate tends to relocate R&D investment from the Euro Area into the UK. A rise in the...

Trade misinvoicing should be seen as an element of de facto capital account openness. Traditional explanations for trade misinvoicing—high custom duties and weak domestic economies—are less persuasive in a world of high growth emerging markets that have low trade barriers. We construct a 53-country data set over a 26 year span, covering both industrialized and developing countries, to study the...

1 Summary In Western Africa, two economic integrations, WAEMU (West African Economic and Monetary Union) and ECOWAS(Economic Community of West African Countries) exist. WAEMU is consisted of eight countries around French possession in Africa and issued the unique legal tender, the CFA franc. On the other hand, ECOWAS is the wider economic integration for 15 countries encompassing the entire WAE...

We extend the trade model with firm heterogeneity developed by Melitz and Ottaviano (2008), incorporating domestic and imported intermediate goods, in order to investigate the impact of import barriers on final and intermediate goods on firms’ decisions to produce and to export. Our main contribution is to disentangle the channels through which these trade policies work. When variable trade cos...