We study whether financial openness facilitates the economic integration of formerly centrally planned economies with the EU-15. Two dimensions of economic integration are considered: cross-country convergence of per-capita incomes and bilateral trade in goods and services. We find that more...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

Small businesses (SMEs) depend on banks for credit. We show that the severity of the Eurozone crisis was worse in countries where firms borrowed more from domestic banks (“domestic bank dependence”) than in countries where firms borrowed more from international banks. Eurozone banking...

Sudden stops in capital flows are a form of financial whiplash that creates instability and crises in the affected economies. Sudden stops in net capital flows trigger current account reversals as countries that were borrowing on net from the rest of the world before the stop can no longer...

Making use of ten years of daily data, this paper examines whether banking sector co-movements between the three largest Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) can be attributed to contagion or to interdependence. Our tests based on simple unadjusted correlation analysis uncover evidence...

We exploit the natural experiment of Japan's opening to international trade to examine how comparative advantage can shape a country's long-run path towards financial development. In the late 19th century, many of Japan's prefectures had a natural comparative advantage in silk reeling. Producing...

Sudden stops in net capital flows can be prevented if domestic investors either repatriate foreign-held assets or roll over their local asset holdings when foreign investors stop lending or sell off their local asset holdings. This paper presents evidence showing that domestic factors such as...

We quantify the impact of barriers to international investment, using a novel multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous investors and imperfect capital mobility. Our model yields a gravity equation for bilateral foreign asset positions. We estimate this gravity equation...

This paper reviews Thailand's structural changes, the 1997 crisis experience, and recovery and lessons from the crisis. The paper then discusses the impacts of the subprime crisis on the Thai economy and the policy responses to date. The paper ends by discussing strategies to rebalance growth by...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is in the process of re-inventing itself with bilateral and multilateral surveillance emerging as a key function. The paper analyses how IMF surveillance announcements may be influenced by political power that member countries exert at the IMF. First, we...