This paper studies the impact of aid volatility in a two-period model where production may occur with either a traditional or a modern technology. Public spending is productive and "time to build" requires expenditure in both periods for the modern technology to be used. The possibility of a...

This paper studies the endogenous determination of pricing to market, in a model with time dependent transportation costs, where the future terms of trade are random. Allowing time dependent transportation costs adds a dimension of investment to the pre-buying of imports, implying that financial...

The purpose of this paper is to explain the reluctance of developing countries to open up their capital market to foreigners, and the conditions inducing an emerging market economy to switch its policies. We consider an economy characterized initially by a one-sided openness to the capital...

This paper studies the welfare effects of financial integration in the presence of moral hazard. Entrepreneurs face a trade off between risk and return. Banks may mitigate the resultant excessive risk by costly monitoring, where greater risk reduction requires more resources devoted to risk...

This paper evaluates the welfare implications of privatization in emerging market economies, in countries where policies are determined by the median voter. We show that privatization may lead to large efficiency gains by changing the menu of taxes. We illustrate this point with two examples....

This paper revisits the Home Bias Puzzle -- the relatively low interna- tional diversification of portfolios. We suggest that part of the diversifi- cation puzzle may be due to reliance on the conventional CAPM model as the benchmark predicting patterns of diversification. We compare the asset...

This paper studies the effect of policy uncertainty on the formation of new activities in Romer's (1994) type of an economy, where productivity of labor increases with the number of capital goods. Adding a new capital good requires a capital specific set-up cost, invested prior to using the...

Developing countries use various risk reduction schemes, ranging from active management of buffer stocks and international reserves to commodity stabilization funds. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the design of these schemes in a generalized expected utility maximization model where...

This paper shows that volatility induces adverse first order welfare effects in countries excluded from the global capital market. This result is illustrated in a model characterized by gains from a greater division of activities, where shocks are persistent. We show that non-linearities...

Recent literature has highlighted the importance of new activities in development and growth. It was shown that trade distortions such as tariffs are associated with first-order costs stemming from the induced drop in the formation of new activities. This paper demonstrates that uncertainty may...