I describe the challenge of fully integrating securities markets in Europe by integrating the clearing and settlement functionalities. The initial condition is characterized by a multitude of standards, conventions, regulation and laws, which are inconsistent with a barrier-free post-trading...

This paper reviews the first evidence on the impact of European Monetary Union on European capital markets, one year after the launch of the single currency. Our assessment of this evidence is very favourable. On almost all counts EMU has either changed the European financial landscape already...

Consider migration to a higher income region as a human capital investment in which parents bear migration costs and children share returns. Migrants from a population with heterogeneous intergenerational discount rates will be self-selected on intergenerational altruism. Thus, immigrants may be...

Male life expectancy at birth fell by over six years in Russia between 1989 and 1994. Many other countries of the former Soviet Union saw similar declines, and female life expectancy fell as well. Using cross-country and Russian household survey data, we assess six possible explanations for this...

Delays at the border for customs clearance are seemingly a central feature of the trade regime in the CIS states. Here, we argue that with queuing costs being endogenously determined in such circumstances tariff liberalization (even in the small economy case) can be welfare worsening since...

During the past five years, there has been an important debate over the differing styles of market reforms in the formerly planned economies in East Asia versus Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (EEFSU). This paper puts forward three related propositions. First, the rapid growth of East...

Many economists believe knowledge production generates positive spillovers among knowledge producers. The available evidence, however, is mixed. We argue that spillovers can exist along three dimensions (idea, geographic, and collaboration space). To isolate the key channel through which...

We conduct the first empirical test of the knowledge burden hypothesis, one of several theories advanced to explain increasing team sizes in science. For identification, we exploit the collapse of the USSR as an exogenous shock to the knowledge frontier causing a sudden release of previously...

The large asset price jumps that took place during 2008 and 2009 disrupted volatility derivatives markets and caused the single-name variance swap market to dry up completely. This paper defines and analyzes a simple variance swap, a relative of the variance swap that in several respects has...

We show a statistically significant and economically relevant effect of open capital accounts on financial deepness and economic growth in a cross-section of countries over the period 1986 to 1995. Countries with open capital accounts over some or all of this period had a significantly greater...