In the context of an empirical model, the authors examine the impact of capital flows, among other fundamentals, on long-term exchange rates in Chile. The real exchange rate and its fundamentals were found to be cointegrated during 1960-92. This cointegration allows a reinterpretation of...

As the scope of Bank work in institutional development ( ID ) widens, the design of ID in Bank projects needs to pay increased attention to several emerging problems and inconsistencies : a) without country specific sector ID strategy, there is no long term perspective to guide project design;...

This paper draws on estimates of consumption functions for 13 developing countries to analyze the effectiveness of public policy in raising saving. First, it provides evidence from time-series and panel data on how liquidity constraints affect consumption functions. This suggests that a rise in...

As a result of Turkey's currency crisis in 1994, output fell 6 percent, inflation rose to three-digit levels, the Central Bank lost half of its reserves, and the exchange rate (against the US dollar) depreciated by more than half in the first three months of the year. The author presents...

The authors analyze the effects of building height restrictions, providing a concrete welfare cost estimate for the city of Bangalore, India. Relying on several theoretical results, their analysis shows that the welfare cost imposed on its residents by Bangalore's building height restriction...

Why does a country's legal origin influence its firms'access to finance? Using data from over 4,000 firms in 38 countries, the authors show that firms in countries with French legal origin face significantly higher obstacles in accessing external finance than firms in common law countries. Next,...

The authors follow the Hellerstein, Neumark, and Troske (1999) framework to estimate marginal productivity differentials and compare them with estimated relative wages. The analysis provides evidence on productivity and nonproductivity-based determinations of wages. Special emphasis is given to...

Brazil dominates the international market for frozen concentrated orange juice. By the mid 1980s, Brazil accounted for about 80 percent of world exports of the product. Brazilian producers supplied more than 94 percent of U.S. imports of the product in the 1980s and accounted for 50 percent of...

Japanese banks are promising sources of capital for developing countries wishing to finance a balance of payments gap. This paper shows that Japanese banks are highly capitalized in terms of market value; much of their capital is"hidden capital,"the divergence between accounting and stock market...

Mandating emission control devices in new cars is only one of the most obvious steps to address the problem of vehicle emissions. Others range from taxes on gasoline and parking to incentives to scrap old cars or move businesses out of the cities. There are models to simulate the engineering...