This paper examines the question of how the path of real GDP in four important Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, might have differed if the sharp run-up in borrowing during the late 1970s and early 1980s had not occurred. Specifically, we ask whether these countries...

In a model that emphasizes technological progress and human capital creator as essential features of economic development, this paper establishes a theoretical link between the financial system and per capita output growth. More specifically, it demonstrates that stock markets--by facilitating...

This paper develops an intertemporal, international asset pricing model for use in applied theoretical and empirical research. An important feature of the model is that it incorporates both stochastic inflation rates and stochastic Purchasing Power Parity deviations (PPP). The model derives the...

This paper isolates the common themes and policy recommendations found in the capital flight literature, and evaluates their statistical, conceptual, and empirical foundations. We find that there is no basis for presuming a stable link between any measure of capital flight and a nation's growth...

This paper attempts to provide some structure to the analysis and measurement of "net resource transfers." We go about achieving this objective in two steps. First, we use standard measures of portfolio changes and balance of payments statistics to evaluate the real resource transfers associated...

Although the literature has devoted prodigious resources to investigating the risk premium explanation of the systematic time-varying discrepancies between forward and corresponding future spot exchange rates, empirical verification of the risk premium hypothesis has proven elusive. This paper...

An important challenge to economists is to explain how financial contracts and institutions affect economic growth while simultaneously explaining how economic development elicits the creation and modification of an economy's financial structure. This paper addresses one side of this inherently...

June 2000 - Do industries that depend heavily on external finance grow faster in market-based or bank-based financial systems? Are new firms more likely to form in a bank-based or a market-based financial system? Beck and Levine find no evidence for the superiority of either market-based or...

April 2000 - Empirical results highlight the downside of imposing certain regulatory restrictions on commercial bank activities. Regulations that restrict banks' ability to engage in securities activities and to own nonfinancial firms are closely associated with more instability in the banking...

July 1999 - This new database of indicators of financial development and structure across countries and over time unites a range of indicators that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets. Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Levine introduce a new database of...