Loss of a parent is one of the most traumatic events a child can face. If loss of a parent reduces investments in children, it can also have long-lasting implications. This study uses parametric and semi-nonparametric matching techniques to estimate how one human capital investment, school...

We analyze how the financial crisis affected a wide range of investments in Indonesian children and children’s outcomes including school enrollment, immunizations, and mortality. Our dataset is the National Socio-Economic Survey (Susenas), a large nationally representative sample. We...

JEL classification codes: O16, F23, E32, O12 Abstract: We investigate whether capital market imperfections constrain investment during an emerging market financial crisis. Both large currency devaluations and widespread collapse of the banking sector characterize recent crises. Although a...

Understanding the possible pitfalls of survey data is critical for empirical research. Among other things, poor data quality can lead to biased regression estimates, potentially resulting in incorrect interpretations that mislead researchers and policymakers alike. Common data problems include...

The Asian crisis was the third financial crisis of the 1990s. Even more than its predecessors it raised questions about the international community’s approach to crisis prevention and crisis management. It led reservations to be voiced, and not only in Asia, about full and unfettered...

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. We show that even were this the case, there remains a...

In many nations, parents exhibit a variety of behaviors that favor sons over daughters. In this paper we provide evidence suggesting that in Indonesia there is no problem of “missing daughters†and that patterns of births, birth spacing and nutrition allocations do not suggest son...

In the face of huge balance of payments surpluses and internal inflationary pressures, China has been in a classic conflict between internal and external balance under its dollar currency peg. Over the longer term, China’s large, modernizing, and diverse economy will need exchange rate...

This talk was presented at the Finlay-O'Brien Lecture, delivered at University College, Dublin, October 7, 1996. One of the themes is that the economics profession knows little about EMU's benefits and costs. But while EMU is a gamble, it is probably a gamble worth taking, if you believe, as I...

We apply a new approach to a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross-border equity flows between 14 countries, 1989-96. The model integrates elements of the finance literature on portfolio composition and the international macroeconomics and asset trade literature. Gross asset flows depend...