Sharp exchange rate depreciations in the East Asian crisis countries (Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand) raised doubts about the efficacy of increasing interest rates to defend the currency. Using a standard monetary model of exchange rate determination, this paper shows that tighter monetary...

This paper examines episodes of the banking system distress and crisis in a large sample of countries. The empirical results identify several macroeconomic and financial variables as useful leading indicators. The main macroeconomic indicators were of limited value in predicting the Asian...

This paper studies the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agriculture. To do so, gravity models are estimated using data on bilateral investment relationships, together with newly constructed indicators of agro-ecological suitability in areas with low population density as...

This paper studies the effects of property-titling on labor supply. The role of legal ownership security is isolated by comparing the effect that being part of, or excluded from, a land title program in a unique quasi-experiment in two similar communities in the Brazilian city of Osasco. Our...

Thailand stands out in international comparison as a country with a high dispersion of productivity across sectors. It has especially low labor productivity in agriculture-a sector that employs a much larger share of the population than is typical for a country at Thailand's level of income....

This paper constructs an integrated framework to disentangle the underlying economic mechanism of industrial transformation. We consider three essential elements for the analysis: skill requirements, industry-wide spillovers, and degrees of consumption subsistence. We find that human and...