We study the determinants of stock market development and the growing migration of capital raising, listing and trading activity to international exchanges. Economies with higher income per capita, sounder macro policies, more efficient legal systems with better shareholder protection, and more...

We establish an empirical regularity that a weak creditor protection index is associated with high stock price volatility. Using a standard Tobin Q model we demonstrate two distinct mechanisms that are responsible for increased volatility: credit guarantees and weak creditor protection that...

This Paper looks at the effect of domestic and external financial liberalization. Using a sample of 27 developing and developed countries, it studies the exchange market pressure and output gap effects of liberalization. The results show that developing and developed countries differ in many...

In this Paper we analyse the current state, past performance, and future prospects of the Greek banking system. Greek banking is in a period of rapid transformation, reflecting the impact of national, European and international forces. Deregulation and European integration are already...

Can Europe's post-war experience with fixed exchange rates be useful for today's emerging market countries? A new conventional wisdom suggests that the answer is negative, that in today's world of huge capital flows the only choice is between freely floating exchange rates and hard pegs. The...

In this paper we concentrate on the potential consequences for the European stock market of a correction of the US stock market. We conduct our analysis by explicitly considering the distinction between interdependence and contagion. By considering a Vector Error Correction Model, in which stock...

We show that international consumption risk sharing is significantly improved by capital flows, especially portfolio investment. Concomitantly, we show that poor institutions hamper risk sharing, but to an extent that decreases with openness. In particular, risk sharing is prevalent even among...

Testing the hypothesis that international equity market correlation increases in volatile times is a difficult exercise and misleading results have often been reported in the past because of a spurious relationship between correlation and volatility. This paper focuses on extreme correlation,...

Diversification opportunities in Euroland appear to have improved significantly since the advent of the euro, thus invalidating the prospects identified in the last years of the convergence-to-EMU period. We identify low frequency movements in the time series of return dispersions suggestive of...

The paper analyzes the effects of changes to regulatory policy and to monetary policy on cross-border bank lending since the global financial crisis. Cross-border bank lending has decreased, and the home bias in the credit portfolio of banks has risen sharply, especially among banks in the euro...