World stock markets are booming. Between 1982 and 1993, stock market capitalization grew from $2 trillion to $10 trillion, an average 15 percent a year. A disproportionate amount of this growth was in emerging stock markets, which rose from 3 percent of world stock markets capitalization to 14...

A shock that lowers profits depresses employment less when wages are flexible in terms of the value-added output price. This kind of flexibility allows a country to remain competitive in world markets when a shock to profits lowers its value-added output price. In many countries, wages are...

The authors theoretically analyze country funds, focusing on emerging economies in which capital markets are not readily accessible to outside investors. They study country-fund pricing and the associated policy implications under alternative variations on segmentation of international markets....

Anderson and Martin provide simple, robust rules for evaluating public spending in distorted economies. Their analysis integrates, within a clean unified framework, previous treatments of project evaluation as special cases. In this paper, the authors use a general system of fiscal accounting...

Emerging market economies (EMEs) have experienced a noticeable decline in inflation since the mid-1990s. Whether this stable price environment in EMEs is likely to endure and what kind of policies need to be followed to ensure price stability, however, still continue to be questions of...

The authors address the issue of how wages are determined in socialist economies. They distinguish between different types of economic regimes, in terms of how much decentralization is permitted and how extensive are market-based features orrules. Wages are commonly assumed to be exogenously...

Cross-sectional tests of asset returns have a long tradition in finance. The often-used capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the arbitrage pricing theory both imply cross-sectional relationships between individual asset returns and other factors, and tests of those models have done much to...

The reform of formerly centrally planned economies involves freeing the price system, developing a competitive environment, and privatizing many of the state-owned or controlled assets and services, while simultaneously generating the social, economic and legal infrastructure that undergrids a...

This study is concerned with the conceptual and measurement problems which arise in comparisons of levels of per capita output and productivity in different countries. The author stresses the reliance of standarized valuations of the different elements of output rather than official exchange...

Throughout the world, the rail industry historically has been one of the most extensively regulated of all sectors. Price, entry, exit, financial structure, accounting methods, vertical relations, and operating rules have all been subject to some form of government control. The public utility...