Trademarks are words, signs, symbols, or combinations thereof that identify goods as manufactured by a particular person or a company, therefore allowing consumers to distinguish between goods originating in different sources. Trademarks belong to the wider family of intellectual property rights...

Firms often cite financing constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. Global capital flows, by bringing in scarce capital, may ease the financing constraints of host country firms. But if incoming foreign investors borrow heavily from domestic banks, foreign direct investment...

The causal link between finance and growth is one of the most striking empirical macroeconomic relationships uncovered in the past decade. As this branch of the literature matures, the focus shifts from growth to other aspects of economic prosperity, and from financial depth to multidimensional...

The authors test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural China. They estimate the risk insurance models by Generalized Method of Moments, treating income and household size as endogenous. Insurance exists for all wealth groups, although the...

Many policy makers are concerned about dependence on resource exports. This paper examines four changes that reduce this dependence: (i) accumulation of capital and skills; (ii) changes in protection policy, particularly reductions in the burden of protection on exporters; (iii) differential...

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...

This paper explores empirically the role of risk and return in the observed evolution of net foreign asset positions of industrial and developing economies. The paper adopts a dynamic approach in which investors'portfolios adjust gradually to their long-run equilibrium, defined by a standard...

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...

Some economists have argued that the process of disintegration of the world economy between the two world wars led to income divergence between the countries. This is in keeping with the view that economic integration leads to income convergence. The paper shows that the view that the period...