Fostering and sustaining robust economic growth is an imperative across advanced, emerging, and low-income countries alike. Countries will need to focus on supply-side reforms to raise their potential output and anchor medium-term growth prospects. This SDN will emphasize the role of structural...

The purpose of this paper is to compare in-sample and out-of-sample performances of three parametric and non-parametric early warning systems (EWS) for currency crises in emerging market economies (EMs). The parametric EWS achieves superior out-of-sample results compared to the non-parametric...

How does access to credit impact consumption volatility? Theory and evidence from advanced economies suggests that greater household access to finance smooths consumption. Evidence from emerging markets, where consumption is usually more volatile than income, indicates that financial reform...

The tax on immovable property has been characterized as probably the most unpopular among tax instruments, in part because it is salient and hard to avoid. But economists continue to emphasize the virtues of the property tax owing to its relatively low efficieny costs, benign impact on growth,...

How do financial markets respond to concerns over debt sustainability and the level of public debt in emerging markets? We introduce a measure of debt sustainability – the difference between the debt stabilizing primary balance and the primary balance–in an otherwise standard spread...

In contrast to advanced markets (AMs), procyclical monetary policy has been a problem for emerging markets (EMs), with macroeconomic policies amplifying economic upswings and deepening downturns. The stark difference in policy has not been subject to extensive study and this paper attempts to...

The literature on the investment technology of foreign versus domestic investors has inconclusive results. This paper revisits the question, with a focus on decomposing portfolio performance into asset allocation and security selection. We document signicant differences in exposure to systematic...

Using panel data for 15 economies from 2001-12, I identify determinants of central bank foreign exchange intervention in emerging markets (“EMs”) with flexible to moderately managed exchange rates. Similar to other studies, I find that central banks tend to “lean against the wind,”...

This book presents the results of a collective and original empirical investigation of the institutional systems underlying the capitalisms that are coming to the fore in developing nations. While varieties of industrialized countries' capitalisms are extensively scrutinized, those of developing...