International Trade and Finance:

Our research in trade focuses on empirical political economy issues. One set of projects involves the political economy of trade barriers, specifically non-tariff barriers. Large databases on non-tariff barriers covering three dimensions -- countries, industries, and time -- are under construction for tests of the second generation of political economy models. Another set of projects involves studying determinants of voting in Congress on trade-related issues such as 1988 Omnibus Act, NAFTA, and recent trade initiatives. Some papers are available as working papers and others are in progress. Current research explores the effects of exchange rate volatility on macroeconomic variables (e.g., trade, growth) in industrialized and developing countries.

Emerging Economies:

Emerging economies is a topic of considerable research activity. Testing of the threshold externalities literature that emphasizes multiple equilibria is the focus of current research. This set of projects involves the construction of a 3-dimensional panel across time, countries, and industries. The experience of Eastern Asian and Eastern European countries since their respective transitions will be used in testing the literature on externalities and growth. In the future, research on emerging economies is expected to include new areas of research such as finance and growth.

Christine Sauer Macroeconomics, Monetary Economics, International Trade and Finance: empirical analysis of exchange rate volatility, economic growth, underdevelopment traps, and monetary integration

Alok Bohara Econometrics, Time Series Analysis, Qualitative and Count Dependent Variable Modeling in Cross-sectional and Panel Data, Environmental Economics: decision-making under probabilistic uncertainty, methodological issues in nonmarket valuation, survey research and public policy, spatial distribution of pollutants (e.g., hazardous waste sites and environmental equity), spatial econometric modeling, voting models and use of Gibbs sampling, financial volatility and growth in emerging economies (e.g., Latin American and East Asian economies)

Courses in Trade, Finance, and Emerging Economies

• Latin American Economics (421)
• Topics in Latin American Development (423)
• International Trade (424)
• International Finance (429)
• Emerging Economies (450)
• International Trade/Finance (580)