This paper examines the influence of political risk guarantees of bilateral investment treaties on debt and equity flows using panel data on middle income countries for the period 1984-2011. Adopting system GMM methodology, the paper empirically finds that ratified bilateral investment treaties...

This paper provides new evidence on Europe's experience with venture capital in the 1990s. Individual countries' activity is not solely determined by country characteristics and a purely domestic history, but also by a common European experience: the interdependence of valuations in primary...

This heterogeneous interacting agents model of a financial market is a generalization of the model proposed by Westerhoff (The Use of Agent-Based Financial Market Models to Test the Effectiveness of Regulatory Policies) by traders who are allowed to have different investment horizons as...

This paper analyses the efficiency of venture capital and its impact on primary equity markets in France and Germany. It shows that venture capital operates according to the signalling model in France and according to the learning model in Germany. Only the learning model can serve as a...

Using cross-country data, this paper estimates the impact of the 2007 financial shock on countries' macroeconomic developments conditional on national financial regulations before the crisis. For this purpose, the financial reform index developed by Abiad et al. (A New Database of Financial...

In the past decades, risk management in the financial community has been dominated by data-intensive statistical methods which rely on short historical time series to estimate future risk. Many observers consider this approach as a contributor to the current financial crisis, as a long period of...

The author suggests the 2008 financial crisis was the culmination of an accelerating process of financial market evolution that is inherently unstable. From his viewpoint markets are not well organized to manage the power financial assets have to generate emotion and their wider effect on human...

We explore how disclosure requirements that regulate the release of new information may affect the dynamics of financial markets. Our analysis is based on three agentbased financial market models that are able to produce realistic financial market dynamics. We discover that the average deviation...

The paper discusses the pros and cons of capital account liberalization. Rather than contrasting liberalization and regulation of capital flows as irreconcilable antagonisms, we argue that capital account liberalization requires institutional and regulatory safeguards. Even though the...

This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...