The effects of capital account openness on economic growth may vary across countries. Some countries may not have in place the constellation of institutions required to fully benefit from open capital accounts. Other countries may realize only small marginal improvements in the wake of capital...

This paper addresses the question of whether societies that afford economic opportunity to women offer other opportunities as well. The analysis in this paper shows that the performance of a country's women in international athletic competition reflects the degree of their relative participation...

Dollarization has been suggested as a policy that might, among other goals, promote trade between a country adopting the dollar and the United States. Evidence supporting this conjecture could be drawn from a recent series of papers by Rose and co-authors who show that a currency union increases...

Political business cycle theories predict that the occurrence and outcome of elections affect the timing of business cycle turning points. Opportunistic political business cycle theory predicts that a contraction is more likely to end soon after an election than at other times. Rational partisan...

Daily foreign exchange operations by the Federal Reserve are not revealed to the public contemporaneously or, up until recently, even years after the fact. With the recent release of daily intervention data it is now possible to gauge the accuracy of the market's perceptions of the Fed's foreign...

This paper examines the pattern of controls on capital inflows, and the association of these controls on financial variables, GDP, and exchange rates. A key point of the paper is the distinction between long-standing controls on a broad range of assets (walls) and episodic controls that are...

This study discriminates FDI technology spillover from learning effects. Whenever learning takes time, our model predicts that foreign investors deduct the economic value of learning from wages of inexperienced workers and add it to experienced ones to prevent them from moving to local...

This paper tests a geography and growth model using regional data for Europe, the US, and Japan. We set up a standard geography and growth model with a poverty trap and derive a log-linearized growth equation that corresponds directly to a threshold regression technique in econometrics. In...

This paper complements the current health policy debate, which is largely confined to the cost aspects of health systems, by considering explicitly the potential economic benefits of investing in health in general and via - chiefly primary - prevention. While concerns about high and rising...