It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on...

Exposure to prenatal androgens affects both future behavior and life choices. However, there is still relatively limited evidence on its effects on academic performance. Moreover, the predicted effect of exposure to prenatal testosterone (T) - which is inversely correlated with the relative...

Is human capital a robust predictor of good institutions? Using a new institutional quality measure, the International Property Rights Index (IPRI), we find that cognitive skill measures are significant, robust, and large in magnitude. We use two databases of cognitive skills: estimates of...

Using event study methodology, we investigate whether bilateral investment protection treaties afford protection to foreign investors. Examining arbitral decisions for firms from six countries shows that firms that received awards from arbitrators gained in market value by as much as 3%. Per...

This paper examines Brada‘s (1998) conjecture about the path of real exchange rates in two successful transition economies, Hungary and Poland. He argues that, as a result of the very diverse fiscal and monetary policies to be found among these economies, real exchange rates in some economies...

This paper critically evaluates the existing empirical literature on creditor moral hazard in sovereign bond markets, proposes a unified theoretical approach to test for IMF-induced creditor moral hazard, and provides empirical evidence, using daily sovereign bond market spreads of Indonesia and...

In this paper, we examine the reaction of stock market returns and volatility in a diverse group of six emerging markets to a set of IMF events. In particular, we test within a panel framework whether there was an “investor panic” causing a significant drop in stock market returns on the...

We use rolling cointegration to measure the convergence of base money, M2, the consumer price index and industrial output between two reference countries, Germany and France, and recent EU members and some transition economy candidates. Counties that recently joined the EU exhibit time-varying...