Crony capitalism and international creditors'self-fulfilling expectations are often suggested as rival explanations for currency crises. A possible link between the two has not been explored. The author shows one channel through which crony capitalism can increase the chance of a...

The literature on the benefits and costs of financial globalization for developing countries has exploded in recent years, but along many disparate channels and with a variety of apparently conflicting results. For instance, there is still little robust evidence of the growth benefits of broad...

In this paper, we adopt a cross-country perspective to examine the evolution of capital flows into China, both in terms of volumes and composition. China's inflows have generally been dominated by foreign direct investment (FDI), a pattern that appears to be favorable in light of the recent...

This paper develops a theory of international trade in which financial development and factor endowments jointly determine comparative advantage. We apply the financial contract model of Holmstrom and Tirole (1998) to the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) model in which firms' dependence on...

The effect of exchange rate volatility on trade flows was examined by a 1984 IMF study on G-7 countries. Over the past two decades, many developments in the world economy, such as the currency crises in the 1990s and increasing cross-border capital flows, may have exacerbated exchange rate...

International capital flows from rich to poor countries can be regarded as either too low (the Lucas paradox in a one-sector model) or too high (when compared with the logic of factor price equalization in a two-sector model). To resolve the paradoxes, we introduce a non-neoclassical model which...

The authors study the impact of corruption in a host country on foreign investors'preference for a joint venture, or a wholly owned subsidiary. Their simple model highlights a basic tradeoff in using local partners. On the one hand, corruption makes the local bureaucracy less transparent, and...

The author offers a possibly new interpretation of the connection between openness and good governance, with a conceptual model and some empirical evidence. Assuming that corruption and bad governance reduce international trade and investment more than domestic trade and investment, a"naturally...

In a sample of fourteen source countries making bilateral investments in forty five countries, the author finds that taxes, capital controls, and corruption, all have large, statistically significant negative effects on foreign investment. Moreover, there is no robust support in the data for...

The author reviews the overwhelming statistical evidence that countries with high levels of corruption experience poor economic performance. Corruption hinders economic development by reducing domestic investment, discouraging foreign direct investment, encouraging overspending in government,...