Interactions between economic development and financial development are studied by looking at the roles of financial institutions in selecting R&D projects (including for both imitation and innovation). Financial development is regarded as the evolution of the financing regimes. The e?ectiveness...

Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia face challenges competing on the global markets, as shown by their relatively low and stagnant export shares. The limited export competitiveness has hampered external demand, growth and employment. Applying, for the first time to North Africa, the stock-flow approach...

This paper studies the dynamics of volatility transmission between Central European (CE) currencies and the EUR/USD foreign exchange using model-free estimates of daily exchange rate volatility based on intraday data. We formulate a flexible yet parsimonious parametric model in which the daily...

This paper analyzes the impact of news, oil prices, and international financial market developments on daily returns on Russian bond and stock markets. First, regarding returns, energy news affects returns, while news from the war in Chechnya is not significant. Market volatility does not appear...

Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition and yet little is known about the characteristics of this new sector. We seek to identify patterns of job growth in this sector in terms of niches left from central planning and ask about differences in job creation across...

In pursuit of its transition from a command to a market economy, Russia has witnessed enormous regional differences in economic growth rates. Moreover, the implementation of economic reforms has also differed markedly across regions. We analyze whether regional differences in reform policies can...

For over a century, economists and policy makers have debated the relative merits of bank-based versus market-based financial systems. Recent research, however, argues that classifying countries as bank-based or market is not a very fruitful way to distinguish financial systems. This paper...

Research in development economics reveals that the bulk of cross-country differences in economic growth is attributable to differences in productivity. By some accounts, productivity contributes to more than 60 percent of countries’ growth in per capita GDP. I examine a particular channel...

A growing body of national-level survey evidence indicates that small-scale entrepreneurial activity has been an important engine of growth in post-socialist economies. Here we use a rich regional data set to obtain a statistical characterization of the relationship between entrepreneurial...