Economic stability, effective bank supervision, and an appropriate sequencing of stabilization, banking regulations, and interest rate policies are identified as common characteristics of the relatively successful experiments in financial sector liberalization. Recent theoretical developments...

The model developed here postulates that learning through experience raises labor productivity with three major consequences. First, the steady-state growth rate of output becomes endogenous and is influenced by government policies. Second, the speed of adjustment to steady-state growth...

This paper provides an analytic overview of independent currency authorities (ICAs), sometimes called currency boards. ICAs issue and redeem domestic currency against an exchange standard on demand and back such operations through a 100 percent marginal foreign reserve cover. They also impose...

The extent to which local communities benefit from commodity booms has been subject to wide but inconclusive investigations. This paper draws from a new district-level database to investigate the local impact on socioeconomic outcomes of mining activity in Peru, which grew almost twentyfold in...

This paper attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private...

We revisit the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross-country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditures. When the size of the middle class increases (measured as the proportion of people...