This paper constructs a new measure of currency mismatch in the banking sector that controls for bank lending to unhedged borrowers. This measure explicitly takes into account the indirect exchange rate risk that banks undertake when they lend to borrowers that will not be able to repay in the...

It is striking that by far the lion's share of empirical studies on the impact of outsourcing on firms considers industrialized countries. However, outsourcing by firms from emerging economies is far from negligible and growing. This paper investigates the link between outsourcing and innovation...

We study the determinants of stock market development and the growing migration of capital raising, listing and trading activity to international exchanges. Economies with higher income per capita, sounder macro policies, more efficient legal systems with better shareholder protection, and more...

The paper provides a simple theory and empirical evidence on the asymmetric effect of credit markets on output decline and output growth. When credit markets are underdeveloped and enterprise activity is financed outside the banking sector, exogenous shocks may induce a break-up of both credit...

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have displayed widely disparate trade performance since the beginning of the transition. The Czech Republic and Hungary have had some success moving into the production and export of more technologically-sophisticated, higher value-added goods, while...

This paper uses firm level panel data to investigate empirically the effects of direct foreign investment (DFI) on the productivity performance of domestic firms in three emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland. To this end a unique firm level panel data...

This Paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature – the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review...

This paper examines spillover effects of the activities of multinational firms (MNCs). Such effects are most likely to be found in host countries, where the operations of foreign multinationals may influence local firms in the MNC’s own industry as well as firms in other industries. There is...

Countries with strong executive constraints have lower growth volatility but similar average growth to those with weak constraints. This paper argues that this may explain a strong reduced-form correlation between executive constraints and inflows of foreign investment. It uses a novel dataset...

Firm-level data for the Czech Republic during 1992–6 suggest that foreign investment has tended to flow to firms of above average size, initial profitability and initial labour productivity. After controlling for this selection bias, we find that foreign investment has a positive, but...