The paper seeks to explain the huge cross country variation in private pension funding,shaped by historical choice made when universal pension systems were created after theGreat Depression. According to Perotti and von Thadden (2006), large inflationaryshocks due to war damage devastated middle...

What determines remittances – altruism or enlightened self-interest - and do remittances trigger additional migration? These two questions are examined empirically in Egypt, Turkey and Morocco for households with family members living abroad. Results show, first, that one cannot clearly...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on links between domestic financial development and economic growth. It starts with the pioneers in this field and then classifies two main schools favouring liberal financial regimes. First McKinnon and Shaw advocated financial...

We quantify the causal effect of foreign investment on total factor productivity (TFP) using a new global firm-level database. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting the difference in the amount of foreign investment by financial and industrial investors and simultaneously controlling...

Risk may induce precautionary saving but it can also reduce saving. The theoretical literature recognizes both possibilities, but favors a positive effect (both for developed and developing countries); the empirical literature is divided, reporting (small) positive effects for developed...

The paper studies risk mitigation associated with capital regulation, in a context when banks may choose tail risk assets. We show that this undermines the traditional result that higher capital reduces excess risk-taking driven by limited liability. When capital raising is costly, poorly...

We show that in a fully integrated economy, in which there is free mobility of goods and factors, each member’s share of total output will equal its shares of total stocks of productive factors (i.e., physical and human capital). We label this result the equal-share relationship. This...

With the advent of globalization, economic and financial interactions among countries have become widespread. Given technological advancements, the factors of production can no longer be considered to be just labor and capital. In the pursuit of economic growth, every country has sensibly...

We find that investor sentiment should affect a firm's employment policy in a world with moral hazard and noise traders. Consistent with the model's predictions, we show that higher sentiment among US investors leads to: (1) higher employment growth worldwide; (2) lower labor productivity, as the...

This paper analyses Net Private Capital Flows to LICs incorporating the recent surge in FDI between 2000 and 2006. We show that including country-specific effects in a paneldata setup resolves the Lucas Paradox, at least for LICs. Our results suggest that openness is among the most important...