Financial development is good for long term growth. So why doesn't every country pursue policies that render full financial development? In this paper, building on a profuse political economy literature, we build a theoretical model that shows that the intensity of opposition by incumbents...

This paper estimates the impact of financial development on industry-level total factor productivity (TFP) growth using a largely unexploited panel of 77 countries with data for 26 manufacturing industries for the years 1963 to 2003. A significant relationship is found between financial...

If rating agencies add no new information to markets, their actions are not a public policy concern. But as rating changes may be anticipated, testing whether ratings add value is not straightforward. This paper argues that ratings and spreads are both noisy signals of fundamentals and suggest...

This paper provides empirical evidence for the importance of institutions in determining the outcome of crises on long-term growth. Once unobserved country-specific effects and other sources of endogeneity are accounted for, political institutions affect growth through their interaction with...

This paper analyzes the impact of public investment on private investment in 116 developing countries between 1980 and 2006. It finds a strong crowding-out effect that seems to be the norm rather than the exception, both across regions and over time. This effect is dampened (or even reversed) in...

This paper presents new empirical evidencesuggesting that the net effect of trade openness on output volatility is stabilizing. The methodology employed seeks to correct for the likely endogeneity of trade in this setting using gravity estimates as instrumental variables. The results confirm...

This study explores the determinants of corporate bond spreads in emerging market economies. Using a largely unexploited dataset, the paper finds that corporate bond spreads are determined by firm-specific variables, bond characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, sovereign risk, and global...

Europe faces challenges reminiscent of Latin American financial crises. The failure of recent liquidity support to normalize the situation in Europe suggests the need to refocus the policy debate on fundamentals: structural reform for growth and, where needed, restructuring to resolve banking...