We study the relationship between finance and growth using a sample of 275 Chinese cities during 2009-2018. We exclude a large amount of bank loans to local governments through the local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). This allows us to construct a new and better financial development...

We study the relationship between finance and growth using a sample of 275 Chinese cities during 2009-2018. We exclude a large amount of bank loans to local governments through the local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). This allows us to construct a new and better financial development...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

This paper analyses the interest rate pass-through for five economies of the Caucasus - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Employing an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) specification to monthly data, we find that the interest rate pass-through is systematically incomplete...

The rapid growth of ASEAN economies, the People’s Republic of China and India (called ACI henceforth) — major drivers of Asia and the world economy—during the last five decades has caused significant strains on their scarce resources, particularly energy and contributed to serious problems...

The Middle East was once seen as a medieval great globalized force. Nowadays it shows one of the lowest intra-regional trade in the world and therefore it is claimed that the region is poorly integrated. Yet, with the steady .ow of workers across national borders of the Middle East is this...

This study examines how the quality of political institutions affects the distribution of the government budget in Iran. We first introduce a mechanism through which democracy can shift government expenditure from national defense (military) to productivity-enhancing public spending (e.g.,...

This study examines how quality of political institutions affects the distribution of government budget and how development of government spending in major sections shapes the political institutions in Iran. This question has become especially important due to recent international sanctions,...

This study examines the economic globalization and the shadow economy nexus in Egypt. Using time series data from 1976 to 2013, the impulse response analysis shows that the response of the shadow economy in Egypt to positive shocks in economic globalization is negative and statistically...

Capital estimates are widely used in economic growth and productivity studies, for profitability considerations and wealth accounting exercises. Yet the calculation of “capital” frequently receives only cursory attention, despite the challenges posed by conceptual difficulties, the...