A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century’s first global...

The causes of the 2008 collapse and subsequent surge in global capital flows remain an open and highly controversial issue. Employing a factor model coupled with a dataset of high-frequency portfolio capital flows to 50 economies, the paper finds that common shocks--key crisis events as well as...

We shed new light on the corporate governance role of institutional investors in markets where concentrated ownership and business groups are prevalent. When companies have controlling shareholders, institutional investors, as minority shareholders, can play only a limited role in corporate...

We use a simple model in which the expected returns in emerging markets depend on their systematic risk as measured by their beta relative to the world portfolio as well as on the level of integration in that market. The level of integration is a time-varying variable that depends on the market...

We study the governance role of Russian Financial-Industrial Groups (FIG) and their impact on financing of investment. We compare member firms of a group with a control set of large firms categorized by dispersed ownership or/and management and employee control. We find that investment is...

This Paper investigates the effects of exchange rate regimes and alternative monetary policy rules for an emerging market economy that is subject to a volatile external environment in the form of shocks to world interest rates and the terms of trade. In particular, we highlight the impact of...

This Paper investigates the benefits and associated agency costs of using internal capital markets through affiliating with groups using data of two thousand firms from nine East Asian economies between 1994-96. We find that mature and slow-growing firms with ownership structures more likely to...

We analyse the impact of financial globalization on asset prices, investment and the possibility of crashes driven by self-fulfilling expectations in emerging markets. In a two-country model with one emerging market (intermediate income level) and one industrialized country (high income level),...

The paper contributes to the literature on integration of stock markets by addressing the issue of non-synchronous trading. We argue that controlling for time differences in trading hours of stock markets is important and show that time-adjustment improves estimates of market integration. We...

This Paper looks at the determinants of country- and industry-specific factors in international portfolio returns using a sample of 36 countries and 39 industries over the last three decades. Country factors have remained relatively stable over the sample period while industry factors have...