This technical note is based on a mission conducted from April 24 to May 9, 2014 to Kingston and other parts of Jamaica. The mission also conducted a short mystery shopping exercise with the assistance of a representative from the national consumer’s league. Valuable comments on the draft note...

This technical note on Investor Protection, Disclosure, and Financial Literacy for Portugal explains investor protection and corporate governance. Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (CMVM) is the regulator in charge on ensuring compliance with disclosure issues as well as the corporate...

This study reviews selected issues on investor protection and corporate governance in Australia, and concludes that the corporate governance framework for Australian-listed companies is largely healthy and dynamic. Shareholder activism is an important element of corporate governance because it...

This paper examines the extent to which conclusions of cross-country studies of private savings are robust to allowing for the possible heterogeneity of savings behavior across countries and the inclusion of dynamics. It shows that neglecting heterogeneity and dynamics can lead to misleading...

Forward-looking behavior on the part of the monetary authority leads least squares estimates to understate the true growth consequences of monetary policy interventions. We present instrumental variables estimates of the impact of interest rates on real output growth for several European...

This paper evaluates the performance of two alternative policy rules, a forward-looking rule and a spontaneous adjustment rule, under alternative inflation targets, in terms of output losses in a macroeconomic model, using European Union data. The simulations suggest that forward-looking rules...

The 2008 crisis underscored the interconnectedness of the international business cycle, with U.S. shocks leading to the largest global slowdown since the 1930s. We estimate spillover effects across major advanced country regions in a structural VAR (SVAR) using pre-crisis data. Our new method...

In the literature on exports and investment, most productive firms are seen to invest abroad. In the Helpman et al. (2004) model, costs of transportation play a critical role in the decision about whether to serve foreign customers by exporting, or by producing abroad. We consider the case of...

Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000) argue that the relation between openness and growth is still an open question. One of the main problems in the assessment of the effect is the endogeneity of the relation. In order to address this issue, this paper applies the identification through heteroskedasticity...

Over the last two decades a number of cross-country empirical studies have been undertaken to assess whether IMF-supported adjustment programs have led to an improved balance of payments and current account balance, lower inflation, and higher growth. These studies use a variety of methodologies...