The purpose of this paper is to model the role of trade dependency in determining the access of a developing economy to the international credit market, and its desirable growth strategy. With full integration of capital markets the choice with respect to the inwardness of a technology is...

Despite an abundance of cross-section, panel, and event studies, there is strikingly little convincing documentation of direct positive impacts of financial opening on the economic welfare levels or growth rates of developing countries. The econometric difficulties are similar to those that...

We provide methods of decomposing the variance of world national incomes into components in such a way as to indicate the most important risk-sharing opportunities, and, therefore, the most important missing international risk markets to establish. One method uses a total variance reduction...

In this paper, we study the interplay between sovereign risk and global financial risk. We show that a substantial portion of the comovement among sovereign spreads is accounted for by changes in global financial risk. We construct bond-level sovereign spreads for dollar-denominated bonds issued...

This paper revisits the long-standing issue of the incidence of taxes in developing countries. Its central theme is that despite many decades of studies, tax incidence analyses for developing countries continue to be based upon the same shifting assumptions used in developed country studies,...

Conventional wisdom about the relationship between income distribution and economic development has been subjected to dramatic transformations in the past century. While classical economists advanced the hypothesis that inequality is beneficial for growth, the neoclassical paradigm dismissed the...

Environmental quality in many developing countries is poor and generates substantial health and productivity costs. However, existing measures of willingness to pay for environmental quality improvements indicate low valuations by affected households. This paper argues that this seeming paradox...

Informal payments are a frequently overlooked source of local public finance in developing countries. We use microdata from ten countries to establish stylized facts on the magnitude, form, and distributional implications of this "informal taxation." Informal taxation is widespread, particularly...

Forecasts of experimental results can clarify the interpretation of research results, mitigate publication bias, and improve experimental designs. We collect forecasts of the results of three Registered Reports preliminarily accepted to the Journal of Development Economics, randomly varying four...

Intuitively, the observed 'home bias' in individual portfolios plausibly explains the international capital immobility in aggregate data reported by Feldstein and Horioka (1980) as well as the survival of taxes on capital income. These intuitions are examined explicitly in a model where random...