The theme of this year's WDR is how to structure institutions to bring about an effectively functioning market economy. There is no question that political institutions play a key role here. In most countries political institutions determine the rules of access to considerable discretionary...

This paper analyzes the recently documented instability of money demand in theeuro area in the framework of a Markov switching trend model. First, we consider astandard flexible price model with stable money demand, rational expectations, andan exogenous income-money ratio which follows a Markov...

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing the role of financial factors as a source of instability in small open economies. Our basic model is a dynamic open economy model with a tradeable good produced with capital and a country-specific factor. We also assume that firms face credit...

In this study, we first estimate the level of financial integration for twenty five emerging stock markets over the last decade. Using a multivariate GARCH(1,1)-M return generating model allowing for partial market integration as well as for the pricing of systematic emerging market risk, we...

Many contributions suggest that earnings instability has increased during the 1980s and1990s. This paper develops and estimates an on-the-job search model of the labor market tostudy the contribution of wage inequality and job mobility in explaining earnings instability. Tostudy the evolution...

A significant but uneven spurt of industrialization started in China during the first three decades of the 20th century at a time of political instability and national disintegration. This article argues that economic growth during this period was closely associated with the rise and expansion...

Is there any need to “clean” up a banking system in the midst of a crisis, by closing or recapitalizing weak banks and taking bad assets off bank balance sheets, or can one wait till the crisis is over? We argue that an “overhang” of impaired banks that may be forced to sell assets soon...

The paper examines the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR)from the perspective of constitutional economics, focusing on the distinction betweena political community’s constitutional choice of the rules of the ‘‘marketgame,’’ and the market players’ sub-constitutional...

Die Frage nach der richtigen Ausgestaltung marktwirtschaftlichen Wettbewerbsist eine, die Politiker, Wirtschaftswissenschaftler und nicht zuletzt Unternehmerund ihre Interessenverbände seit langer Zeit bewegt. Trotz der langen und intensiven Diskussionen ist es dennoch bis dato nicht gelungen,...