This paper demonstrates that, after integration, equity portfolios of countries that joined the European Monetary Union have converged at faster rate than those of NON EMU countries. This outcome canbe interpreted as a combination of the convergence of inflation rates and the convergence of...

In the wake of the Mexican and Asian currency turmoil, the subject of financial crises has come to the forefront of academic and policy discussions. This paper analyzes the links between banking and currency crises. We find that: problems in the banking sector typically precede a currency...

At the time of writing there were widespread concerns about the health of the U.S. economy. There is conclusive evidence that the pace of growth has slowed, which has prompted the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates on two occasions (a total of 100 basis points thus far). As usual, when faced...

Over the past few decades Islamic finance has been the fastest growing segment of the global system. The fast growing market has necessitated corresponding expansion of education and training facilities to increase appropriately the supply of skilled manpower. This called for a stock taking of...

This paper analyses the through-the-cycle rating concept; basically, we try to specify its main characteristics, focusing on the differences with point-in-time ratings. We also discuss the effects of this methodology on the prediction power of default probabilities, on the stability of those...

This paper deals with loans dollarization of V4 countries residents, its development and sectoral composition. By conducting simple OLS regression for each V4 country tries to find out some factors that may have been contributing to dollarized loans development.

Based on a sample of 104 countries, we document four key stylized facts regarding the interaction between capital flows, fiscal policy, and monetary policy. First, net capital inflows are procyclical (i.e., external borrowing increases in good times and falls in bad times) in most OECD and...

In this paper, we examine which markets are most synchronized internationally and exhibit the greater extent of comovement. We focus on daily data for four asset markets: bonds, equities, foreign exchange, and domestic money market. Our sample covers thirty-five developed and emerging market...

The main theme of this paper is that debt cycles deeply entrenched in the process of development, and one must be careful about trusting magic elixirs that purport to finesse the problem entirely. Middle income countries nascent political and economic institutions, often simultaneously face...

The "traditional structural approach" to the determination of real commodity prices has relied exclusively on demand factors as the fundamentals that explain the behavior of commodity prices. This framework, however, has been unable to explain the marked and sustained weakness in commodity...