The author examines the extent to which micro-credit reduces poverty and vulnerability through a case study of BRAC, one of the largest providers of micro-credit to the poor in Bangladesh. Household consumption data collected from 1,072 households is used to show that the largest effect on...

More than 200 Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) operate in 48 countries. Their combined assets exceed $200 billion, with an annual growth rate between 12 percent and 15 percent. The regulatory regime governing IFIs varies significantly across countries. A number of international...

The authors argue that emerging economies borrow short term due to the high risk premium charged by international capital markets on long-term debt. They first present a model where the debt maturity structure is the outcome of a risk-sharing problem between the government and bondholders. By...

The issue of the credit crunch in the aftermath of the Asian crisis has stimulated much debate. Indeed, some features of the East Asian economies, such as bank-based financial systems and high leverage, make them particularly vulnerable to monetary and financial shocks. Under such circumstances,...

The authors examine the relationship between foreign investment and the attributes of emerging market countries and firms in which investment is made. Their findings indicate that countries with higher levels of economic development and floating exchange rate regimes tend to have greater ability...

The neoclassical theory of project evaluation is based on models in which agents discount the future at a constant exponential rate. But there is strong empirical evidence that people discount the future hyperbolically, applying larger annual discount rates to near-term returns than to returns...

The success with which middle-income indebted developing countries have gained access to private international finance in the 1990s is a tribute to their own domestic economic performance, international policy in dealing with the debt crisis of the 1980s, and innovation in international...

The author makes a case for improving capacity in developing countries to monitor and analyze data on private capital flows, especially portfolio investment flows (through both debt and non-debt instruments). He surveys recent economic literature and identifies unanswered international...

The author provides a descriptive analysis of credit and monetary policies in Malaysia and investigates the distributional consequences of monetary policy there by focusing on small and medium-size industries and large manufacturing firms. The author suggests that"payoff"or"default"risk - as...

Taking the Korean experience as a laboratory experiment in systemic financial crises, the authors analyze distress in individual institutions among two groups of financial intermediaries. They pool together a group of large financial intermediaries (commercial banks, merchant banking...