This paper extends a structural model of investment with costly external finance to firms in business groups, derives an empirical regression counterpart, and uses it to test for the existence of internal capital markets in business groups and various characteristics of a group that tend to...

This paper uses transaction-level data from Thailand to study concentration, specialization, and fragility of export activities. The paper shows that although exports have been an integral part of the development strategy of the country for several decades, direct engagement in international...

This paper discusses the development of four production sectors of the economies in Southeast Asia since the end of the Second World War: agriculture, non-renewable natural resources, manufacturing, and services. First, although Southeast Asia has experienced sectoral transformation toward...

This paper provides narrative background on economic and political development of the 11 countries in Southeast Asia. It shows that post-World War II development experience, economic policies, and current economic performance in each country have deep historical roots, at least back to the...

This paper explores episodes of financial crises and recessions experienced by the economies in Southeast Asia: the global debt crisis and the commodity price collapse in the 1980s, the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s, and the burst of the dot-com bubble and the global financial crisis in...

This paper provides background on sovereign wealth funds in Southeast Asia: Brunei Investment Agency (BIA), Timor-Leste Petroleum Fund (PT), Singapore's GIC and Temasek, Malaysia's Khazanah and 1MDB, and Vietnam's State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC). These funds are diverse in their...

This paper analyzes macroeconomic growth of the economies in Southeast Asia since the end of the Second World War. It argues that there appears a convergence in development strategy among the economies in this region in recent decades. With few exceptions, every economy in Southeast Asia has...

Large private enterprises in the ASEAN-5 economies have been, and remain, dominated by firms that share four common characteristics: (1) their ownership and control are concentrated among a handful of prominent business families; (2) most of these families have Chinese origins; (3) each family...

The Thai economy has been underperformed during the last decade. The average annual GDP growth during 2007-2016 was merely 3.2 percent. Not only was this growth rate one of the lowest among all of the economies in Southeast Asia, it was also far below what Thailand experienced during the...

Some gasoline markets exhibit remarkable price cycles, where price spikes are followed by a string of small price declines until the next price spike. This pattern is predicted from a model of competition driven by Edgeworth cycles, as described by Maskin and Tirole. We extend the Maskin and...