As the 2008 financial crisis spread globally, it became widely apparent that an essential ingredient to preventing future systemic crises was reform of the regulation of financial markets. Two ambitious initiatives for regulatory reform are the European Union's European System of Financial...

Microeconomic evidence from 40 countries shows that financial development aids growth by reducing financing constraints that would otherwise restrict efficient firm investment.The relationship between the financial and real sides of the economy has long been a topic of intense interest and...

The process of liberalization of international trade and of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has constituted a broadly accepted trend during the last few decades and FDI inflows have expanded constantly since the end of the 1980's. However, signs of a certain crisis of the positive and one-way...

The 2005 split-share reform in China mandated the conversion of nontradable stocks into tradable status. This paper examines the effects of stock markets on corporate outcomes exploiting multiple institutional features of the Chinese conversion program. Using a generalized propensity score...

Common drivers of FDI in Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, and Lithuania are identified in this paper and relationships among financial variables are described that permit policymakers to create guidelines and strategies for a more profitable environment for economic...

Slovenia is the first of the recent Accession countries to the EU to adopt the Euro as its currency. Its location at the top of the Balkan line and just under Austria and Italy makes it psychologically advantageous as a bridge for commercial and financial entry to other Balkan nations. Advances...

As the Czech and Slovak Republics move toward free societies and market economies, some policy points to consider include: transparency of markets, economies, social and political organizations; an increase in commerce and investment, which makes reversals of reforms less likely (see the...

This paper investigates to what extent low-income developing countries (LIDCs) characterized as frontier markets (FMs) have begun to be subject to capital flows dynamics typically associated with emerging markets (EMs). Using a sample of developing countries covering the period 2000-14, we show...

We propose an exogenous measure of a country's growth opportunities by interacting the country's local industry mix with global price to earnings (PE) ratios. We find that these exogenous growth opportunities predict future changes in real GDP and investment in a large panel of countries. This...

We show that equity market liberalizations, on average, lead to a one percent increase in annual real economic growth. The effect is robust to alternative definitions of liberalization and does not reflect variation in the world business cycle. The effect also remains intact when an exogenous...