In this paper we do a couple of things: discussing a way to measure the welfare cost of country risk, and measuring it for Argentina in the period 1875-2006. There are two conclusions: a) the welfare cost of Argentine risk has been huge: for example, in the period 1976-2006 it was around 20% of...

Since 2004 Egypt's growth has been accelerating in step with the launching of a series of ambitious reforms, reversing a trend during the preceding half-decade when Egypt's growth rate fell below that of most regional peers and well below that of the average developing country. This paper seeks...

This paper investigates the link between banking system expansion and economic growth. Contrary to evidence from the United States, several recent microeconomic studies from developing country settings do not find enduring effects of banking that carry over to the medium or long term. The paper...

This paper examines the impact of financial sector foreign direct investment (FSFDI) on economic growth by estimating a panel data model for 11 Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) between 1996 and 2003 in a cross-country growth accounting framework. The analysis concentrates on the...

We develop a rational expectations model of financial bubbles and study ways in which a generic risk-return interplay is incorporated into prices. We retain the interpretation of the leading Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette model, namely, that the price must rise prior to a crash in order to compensate...

During the last decades, China has experienced double-digit economic growth rates and rising inequality. This paper implements a new decomposition on the China Health and Nutrition Panel Survey (1991-2006) to examine the extent to which changes in level and distribution of incomes and in income...

This paper tests empirically the effect of the real inflows of the foreign direct investment on the Egyptian growth rate by utilizing a simple intervention time series model to capture the dynamism of such effect over time. The results show positive significant effects of the real foreign direct...

In this short note, we describe a simple yet accurate way to set up a rate curve defined by daily forward rates that are computed as a spread over the daily forward rates of a reference rate curve. One current use case of interest is to build an Ester curve from an Eonia curve using the...

The valuation of equity is a central topic in finance and accounting from many fronts. However, equity valuation is still subjective as different analysts obtain target prices that are not similar despite using the same publicly available information. Growth has a substantial influence on the...