Commodity-equity and cross-commodity return co-movements rose dramatically after the 2008 financial crisis. This development took place following what has been dubbed the 'financialization' of commodity markets. We first document changes since 2000 in the intensity of speculative activity in...

We conduct an empirical study on how 22 donors allocate their bilateral aid among 147 recipient countries over the 1970-2004 period to investigate whether recent changes in the international aid architecture-at the international and country level-have led to changes in donor behavior. We find...

This paper provides empirical evidence that campaign contributions arestrongly associated with market expectations of future firm-specific political favors,including preferential access to external financing. Using a novel dataset, we find thatfirms in Brazil providing contributions in the 1998...

This paper surveys the literature on the linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes. It focuses on three major questions. First, what are the basic theoretical linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes? Second, what is the empirical evidence supporting these...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the macroeconomic implications of financial imperfections. It focuses on two major channels through which financial imperfections can affect macroeconomic outcomes. The first channel, which operates through the demand side of finance...

This paper analyzes the behavior of gross capital inflows across 34 emerging markets (EMs), including eight Asian economies. We first confirm that aggregate inflows to EMs comove considerably. Three findings are reported: (i) the aggregate comovement conceals significant heterogeneity across...

This paper provides a brief analysis of three major questions raised in the context of the recent global financial crisis. First, how similar is the crisis to previous episodes? We argue that the crisis featured some close similarities to earlier ones, including the presence of credit and asset...

The purpose of the study is two-fold. First, it examines whether Internet usage converges across the geographical space comprising the European Union and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Second, it aims to expand the currently rather limited empirical evidence on the determinants of Internet...

In this paper we focus on the question: will the HIPC debt reduction programme help in the transformation of the development assistance business and change the rules of the ‘debt game’ in Africa? We concentrate on the donor and official creditor side, by exploring how the growing debt of...

We document that firms in eight East Asian countries and Japan diversify into more segments and engage into more related businessesas measured by the degree of vertical relatedness and complementaritythan firms in the USA. Using data for the 1990-6 period, we observe a trend towards...