Increasing portfolio investment flows to emerging markets in the past few years have led to fears of a sudden reversal of these flows and possible portfolio switching (from one emerging market to another) among foreign investors. To assess the sustainability of such portfolio flows, the author...

Academics pay little attention to international bank lending, focusing instead on rapidly growing market segments such as the international bond market and derivative credit instruments. The authors argue for paying more attention to international bank lending. Why? Three reasons. First, the...

Capital flows to developing countries are small and take mostly the form of loans rather than direct foreign investment. We build a simple model of North-South capital flows that highlights the interplay between diminishing returns, production risk and sovereign risk. This model generates a set...

Cross-sectional tests of asset returns have a long tradition in finance. The often-used capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the arbitrage pricing theory both imply cross-sectional relationships between individual asset returns and other factors, and tests of those models have done much to...

This paper addresses the question of how important officially supported export credits (OSECs) were, both in quantity and quality, in Sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) external financing during the last two decades, and examines the prospects for the 1990s. The paper begins by briefly explaining the...

The authors empirically analyze the association between firm financing choices and the level of development of financial markets in 30 countries for the period 1980-91. For the whole sample, there is a statistically significant negative correlation between stock market development, as measured...

The authors suggest that the credit channel - as a transmitter of monetary and financial shocks - appears to have aggravated the Republic of Korea's economic crisis. They use micro-data gathered at the bank level to better identify this channel of transmission. They find that: 1) Monetary...

The peak of the first global real estate boom was reached around 1990 in most Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Asset inflation was massive: in office markets across Europe, capital values rose 400 percent between 1980 and 1990, accelerating after 1986 -...

This paper discusses the magnitude of external resources that sub-Saharan Africa may require during the 1990s. There can be no firm projections because requirements are affected both by the growth and efficiency targets chosen and by a wide range of factors, both internal and external to...

Bank owner contingent liability has been important in the development of many industrial countries. Unlimited liability on bank owners was an important element in the success of Scottish banking, which led Scotland to be free of the banking and monetary upheavals that occurred in Britain and the...