This article uncovers the role of financial clustering in creating competitive advantage forincumbents in the Singapore Financial Centre. The revelatory case of the underresearchedSingapore cluster reveals (a) how clustering conditions have influenced thedevelopment of the City as a financial...

This paper explores the sources of agglomeration externalities in enhancing firmperformance, in particular, the pecuniary externality that supports firms’ bottom line.The fundamental argument on increasing returns leads to the premise that cluster sizehas beneficial influence to firm...

The IDB Group, guided by its Strategy for Microenterprise Development, has made the creation of a sustainable market of services to the sector one of its most important priorities during the past decade. This report presents an overview of the contributions the IDB has made to the...

A growing number of studies in finance decompose multi-period buy-and-hold portfolioreturns into a series of single period returns. The method used to decomposethese returns is important because researchers use them in tests of asset pricing modelsand market efficiency and in evaluating the...

We use a unique dataset of bond downgrades from a niche rating company that has been found to be reacting faster to publicly available information than its competitors. Using regime-switching models we propose risk measures to quantify stock return disturbances (distress costs) associated with...

This paper examines the price impact of trading intensity on an emerging futures market. Utilizing anovel volume-augmented duration model of price discovery, the intensity effect is decomposed intoliquidity and information components for the MexDer 28-day interest rate futures contract. We...

Housing is more than just basic shelter - it can be a valuable monetary asset, both to households and nations. This book draws on research by experts at the Inter-American Development Bank and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to examine the economic, social and legal...

This document summarizes the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) experience as one of the main sources of multilateral development financing in Latin America and the Caribbean. From 2000 to 2005, total financing for economic, social and institutional development projects amounted to US$38.7...

This report compressed the results of a four-month initiative to identify unmet needs and market opportunities in Colombia, El Salvador, Brazil and Mexico, and present a potential private sector solutions that can address these unmet needs profitably.

The market for asset-backed securities (ABS) – financial instruments backed by underlying assets such as mortgages – suffered a major setback in 2007, as a cascade of downgrades and defaults brought turmoil to credit markets and the world economy. Authorities in the United States have since...