Liberalization unleashed a wave of globalization over the period 1980-2007, and the international sector experienced miracle growth. While profits rose to all time highs, global saving exceeded global investment. Long-term interest rates declined to very low levels. After a global housing...

This paper reviews the key legal and policy measures designed to limit moral hazard in bank insolvency systems and compares and explores how existing national insolvency systems have implemented these principles. While many legal systems include prohibitions or limitations on the use of public...

This paper consists of four short pieces on the subprime mortgage market. Based upon a proprietary database, LoanPerformance, of 80 million mortgage loans originated from January 1999 to July 2007, these pieces demonstrate: (1) the subprime loan market has contributed to a net gain in...

Writings on the macroeconomic impact of capital account liberalization find few, if any, robust effects of liberalization on real variables. In contrast to the prevailing wisdom, I argue that the textbook theory of liberalization holds up quite well to a critical reading of this literature. The...

The high cost of international economic and financial crises highlights the need for a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of national economic and financial systems. This paper proposes a new comprehensive approach to measure, analyze, and manage macroeconomic risk based on the...

This paper studies the association between the market's expectations of Saddam Hussein's fall from power, as reflected in quot;Saddam contractquot; prices, and stock prices, oil prices and exchange rates. During the war, a rise in the probability of Saddam's fall, which also indicated a speedy...

The paper first analyzes the current situation of the bond markets in Bangladesh: The bond market has played a limited role in the Bangladesh economy. The Bangladesh bond market is also rather shallow compared to the neighboring countries. Then, the paper analyzes the main impediments to the...

Investment competition between local governments is a well-reported phenomenon accompanying the stage of economic take-off in China. Thus it is of important practical significance to investigate how the central bank can effectively realise its objectives in the context of such a competition when...

The paper reviews the current literature on the subject in both the New Consensus and the Post Keynesian framework. It shows that both approaches give to central banks a wrong goal (inflation, distribution, curbing speculation, etc.) and a wrong instrument (interest rate rule). The paper claims...

Using a database of 440 international political crises over the period 1918-2002, we find that international crises reduce world market stock returns by approximately four percent per annum. Crises cause large negative stock market reactions in their first month, lower than average returns...