Quality of public institutions has been recognized as a crucial determinant of macroeconomic outcomes. We propose that a country's intrinsic level of openness (due to population size, geography, or exogenous trade opportunities) affects its incentives in investing in better institutions. We...

Does finance follow the real economy, or the other way around? This paper unites the two competing schools of thought in a general equilibrium framework. Our key result is that there are threshold effects defined by a set of deep institutional parameters (cost of financial intermediation,...

This paper offers a new interpretation of the connection between openness and good governance. Assuming that corruption and bad governance drive out international trade and investment more than domestic trade and investment, a naturally more open economy' as determined by its size and geography...

The paper studies the effect of the market's perceived exchange rate volatility on bid-ask spreads. The anticipated volatility is extracted from currency options data. An increase in the perceived volatility is found to widen bid-ask spreads. The direction of the effect is consistent with an...

Large savings and current account surpluses by China and other countries are said to be a contributor to the global current account imbalances and possibly to the recent global financial crisis. This paper proposes a theory of excess savings based on a major, albeit insufficiently recognized by...

This paper evaluates the relation between house prices and economic growth. Using a dataset that covers house prices for 19 countries from the first quarter of 1975 to the third quarter of 2013. We find that house price appreciations are positively associated with economic growth, while the...