Focusing on the local financing constraint sheds new light on issues of aid, fiscal reform, and the management of public spending. The fungibility of aid need not translate into resource flows to fill the local financing gap. Indeed, project aid can widen the local financing gap. To augment...

Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why (The World Bank, 1998) generated a new wave of controversy about foreign aid and policy conditionality that had seen several decades of intense debate. Much of the recent debate has focused on the aid-growth relationship and the role...

Banking sectors in transition economies have experienced major transformations throughout the 1990s. While some countries have been successful in eliminating underlying distortions and restructuring their financial sectors, in some cases financial sectors remain underdeveloped and the rates of...

The authors investigate the origins of the East Asian crisis and its contagion, examine the channels of contagion, and discuss policy recommendationsThey make detailed recommendations in the context of nine general lessons learned from the East Asian crisis. 1) Preventing crises and contagion:...

The author analyzes the relationship between growth and financial intermediation at the sub-national level within China. Does the quality of the banking sector in a province affect its rate of growth? Do state and non-state banking sectors perform differently? Does the structure of the local...

The objective of this paper is to empirically test across alternative, apparently observationally equivalent theories of currency crises. Theories of crises are often difficult to distinguish from each other based on the behavior of commonly used predictors. Using a comprehensive data set on...

The authors extend the recent literature on the link between financial development and economic volatility by focusing on the channels through which the development of financial intermediaries affects economic volatility. Their theoretical model predicts that well-developed financial...

Institutional investors have become tremendously important in U.S. capital markets in recent years. But a study of 557 U.S. manufacturing firms (1985-90) shows the role of such investors to be mixed. Results show the following: 1) institutional ownership has a positive effect on capital spending...

The openness or internationalization of financial services is a complex issue because it is closely related to structural reforms in the domestic financial sector with some perceived implications for macroeconomic stability. The authors investigate the impact of foreign bank entry on the...

Using historical data on sovereign and individual borrowers, the authors assess the potential impact on non-high-income countries of linking capital asset requirements for banks to private sector ratings, as the Basel committee has proposed. They show that linking bank's capital asset...