To understand the growth effects of currency undervaluation we estimate its impact on the different components of GDP. We find that, for developing countries, undervaluation does not affect the tradable sector, but does lead to greater domestic savings and investment, as well as employment.

In recent years, the term “fear of floating” has been used to describe exchange rate regimes that, while officially flexible, in practice intervene heavily to avoid sudden or large depreciations. However, the data reveals that in most cases (and increasingly so in the 2000s) intervention has...

Using industry-level data, this paper shows that the European transition region benefited much more strongly from financial integration in terms of economic growth than other developing countries in the years preceding the current crisis. We analyze several factors that may explain this finding:...

In the present contribution, I concentrate on the process of financial liberalization in a specific context of European economic and monetary integration. I implement de facto and de jure measures of financial liberalization and find that formal aspects of financial openness generate a strongly...

During the past two decades, many countries have embarked on a path of developing their financial markets, strengthening their technological base and stabilizing their economies. This paper finds that financial development and investment in information and communications technology (ICT) have...

This paper presents a stylized model of international trade and asset price bubbles. Its central insight is that bubbles tend to appear and expand in countries where productivity is low relative to the rest of the world. These bubbles absorb local savings, eliminating inefficient investments and...

Using industry-level data, this paper tries to explain why financial integration raised growth differentials between externally dependent and less dependent industries in European transition countries, but not in other developing or advanced countries in the years preceding the current crisis....

This paper analyzes whether the decline in economic growth that follows a banking crisis occurs because of a reduction in the amount of credit available (finance effect) or a worsening in the allocation of investable resources (asset allocation effect). We use a sample of more than 2500...

This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk; and to a lesser extent by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

The paper examines the causal relationship between stock market development and economic growth in South Africa while controlling for the effect of banking variable. It applies vector error correction model (VECM), generalized impulse response function (GIRF) and variance decomposition (VDC). In...