This paper finds that reforms introduced by the IMF to promote transparency have created more informed markets and reduced borrowing costs for those emerging market countries that volunteered for them. Using a quarterly panel estimation with fixed country effects, we find that sovereign spreads...

"We quantify the role of financial frictions and the initial misallocation of resources in explaining development dynamics. Following a reform that triggers efficient reallocation of resources, our model economy with financial frictions converges slowly to the new steady state-it takes twice as...