This study addresses the potential trade-off between inflation and exchange rate targeting in former transition countries, which now may be labeled emerging market economies and which prepare for entry into the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Among this group of countries, some implemented...

Extract: As the Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm predicts, in a world where capital markets are perfect and production exhibits constant-returns to scale, while aggregate wealth endowments can be an important source of comparative advantage, their internal distribution does not matter for the...

Recent research has explored the growing ‘financialization’ process in the U.S. and other advanced economies. The term is a catch-all phrase used to denote important changes in the structure of non-financial corporations’ balance sheets, including the growth of income from financial...

In 1997 former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volker posed a question about the commercial banking system he said he could not answer. The industry was under more intense competitive pressure than at any time in living memory, Volcker noted, “yet at the same time the industry never has...

Financial markets in less developed countries suffer from financial dualism, a situation in which a large informal sector coexists alongside a formal one. Contemporary financial market theories are not able to incorporate an understanding of the informal sector and are, therefore, only...

An economy faces an unknown individual risk, such as the health effects of a recently discovered environmental hazard. Opinions may be widely different about the distribution of risks across the population. We study financial markets that suffice to reach efficient allocations in this situation....

We study endogenous uncertainty stemming from the introduction of new financial assets, so as to evaluate the risks as well as the welfare gains of financial innovation. The introduction of financial assets to hedge individual risk can lead to the risk of default, which is a collective risk. The...

An economy faces an unknown individual risk, such as the health effects of recently discovered environmental hazard. Opinions may be widely different about the distribution of risks across the population. We study financial markets that suffice to reach efficient allocations in this situation....

This research seeks to identify the factors that account for the variation in development levels across nations by focusing on the institutional components of development, especially the effects of financial market development on economic and political development. I argue that financial market...

Nations opened local stock exchanges at a rapid pace during the late 1980s and 1990s, creating a channel for investment capital from wealthy industrial nations to "emerging markets" as well as a mechanism for institutional change in local economies. This study examines the local and global...