Four essays, or chapters, model the capital structure, governance, and investment decisions as part of a sequential game. Each chapter is separate in its context, assumptions, and conclusions. The titles of the chapters are below.Abstracts of each essay or chapter can be found at the beginning...

South Africa has overcome adverse initial conditions to achieve a remarkable fiscaltransformation since the 1994 democratic elections, held amid uncertainty about its ability to maintain the rule of law and resist populist spending pressures. Constitutionally-based, durable and credible fiscal...

This paper reviews the design and performance of monetary policy in South Africa (SA) during 1994-2004. Quantitative indexes of transparency reveal a strong rise in the transparency and accountability of monetary policy between 1994 and 2004. Inflation and interest rate expectations data and...

A recent paper by Kraay (2003) documents the lack of any systematic associationbetween monetary policy and the outcome of a speculative attack. This paper extendsKraay’s work by introducing an improved measure of monetary policy and an additionalcountry-specific fundamental, short-term...

The analysis of reputation as a contract enforcement instrument where legal institutions, especially commercial courts, fail to enforce commercial contracts has focused on informal credit markets. The literature centres on the argument that lenders or co-borrowers in group lending can easily...

In common with many emerging market countries, South Africa’s government does not publish balance sheet wealth estimates on a market value basis, as produced in the U.S., U.K., Japan, and elsewhere. Yet without information on the market values of liquid and illiquid personal sector wealth, it...

Japan's markets for money, capital and foreign exchange are among the biggest worldwide. For many years, Tokyo's role as the leading financial center in Asia has been unchallenged. However, recently, other places in the region such as Singapore and Hong Kong have invested heavily to strengthen...

In this note we show that tax-rate elasticities of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to Central and East European Countries (CEECs) derived from statutory corporate income tax rates (STRs) are likely to be flawed. From a conceptual point of view STRs are problematic as they neither capture tax...