The determinants of venture capital investment have attracted a significant amount of attention from both academics and policymakers. We use a version of the Keuschnigg-Nielsen model for venture-capital financed projects to condition our analysis on a reasonable set of exogenous variables but we...

Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s which resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994-95 Mexican crises, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian...

Should aid be better coordinated? And if so, how? The case for aid coordination is a powerful one. As aid poured into Haiti in the wake of a massive earthquake in January 2010, television coverage around the world broadcast two different realities. One story was about well-organized aid-givers...

In all societies people seek shelter against such risk where their livelihood is for some reason endangered. Childhood, sickness, accidents, and old age are classical examples of social risks that a society somehow must encounter. A society that does not take care of its vulnerable members is...

The paper takes a closer look at the institutional set-up of financial markets in the United States of America and investigates whether the US can serve as a model for the EU. The overall conclusion is that the US institutional set-up as a whole does not seem to be a suitable benchmark for the...

The reaction of exports to real exchange rate movements can differ according to the nature of the destination country. We derive and estimate a gravity equation for 20 OECD exporting countries and 52 developed and developing importing countries. We test how trade costs dampen the effect of real...

Why is GDP so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? To answer this question, we propose a theory of technological diversification. Production makes use of different input varieties, which are subject to imperfectly correlated shocks. As in endogenous growth models,...

In the first era of financial globalization (1880-1914), global capital market integration led to substantial net capital movements from rich to poor economies. The historical experience stands in contrast to the contemporary globalization where gross capital mobility is equally high, but did...

To clarify the causal links between financial activity and economic growth, three theoretical models are analyzed and a structural equation path models is estimated. In the modeling part, poverty traps result from large fixed costs or high proportions of real investment to run a financial...