Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple...

We propose exploiting the term structure of relative interest rates to obtain estimates of changes in the timing of a currency crisis as perceived by market participants. Our indicator can be used to evaluate the relative probability of a crisis occurring in one week as compared to a crisis...

The objective of this paper is an ex-post evaluation of the European Union-Southern African Development Community Economic Partnership Agreement (EU-SADC EPA) stemming from changes in trade flows from the six members of the SADC (Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, and South...

Economies have markedly different firm size distributions. At the same time, firms of different size grow differently after identical financial- and product-market liberalization reforms. Thus, identical reforms can produce different growth outcomes across countries. This result is reached after...

Aufbauend auf einem theoretischen Rahmenmodell, das sowohl positive als auch negative Wachstumseffekte des Finanzsektors berücksichtigt, wird die makroökonomische Effizienz des Finanzsektors definiert. Die empirische Untersuchung des theoretischen Modells anhand von 28 west- und...

This paper analyzes the impact of participation in job creation schemes (JCSs) on job search outcomes in the context of the turbulent East German labor market in the aftermath of the German reunification. High job destruction characterized the economic environment. JCSs were heavily used in...