"This paper examines legal and regulatory measures that can be taken to promote access to the primary market in emerging market economies. While capital market development depends on many factors including, primarily, a favorable macroeconomic environment, an appropriately designed and effective...

"It is so widely recognized that innovation is a key driver of economic growth that it is cliche to say so. This article studies product innovation by firms with data from 68 countries, covering more than 25,000 firms in eight manufacturing sectors. The author assesses the predictions of...

"The author assesses empirically the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education. Although the results in the empirical literature tend to be inconclusive, using model averaging methods in the framework of cross-country and panel regressions, this paper finds an...

"The authors provide various estimates of the government net capital stocks for a panel of 26 developing countries over the period 1970-2001. Two kinds of internationally comparable series of public capital stocks are presented. The first estimates are based on the standard perpetual inventory...

"A rapidly growing empirical literature is studying the causes and consequences of bank fragility in contemporary economies. The authors reviews the two basic methodologies adopted in cross-country empirical studies-the signals approach and the multivariate probability model-and their...