Prevailing views suggest that short-term, unhedged foreign borrowing and crony capitalism, in combination with a weak financial system and lack of transparency may lie at the heart of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Although the crisis first began in Thailand, it quickly spread to the rest...

This paper tests the validity of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) doctrine for Ghana using the conventional relative PPP equation. We conducted a univariate Augmented Dickey-Fuller unit root test on the model variables. Exchange rate and CPI data for Ghana and the USA were collected on annual basis...

Sustaining balanced current accounts is a tremendous challenge that faces many developing countries. The growing gap between burgeoning imports for domestic consumption and investment needs and exports from uncompetitive export sectors in many of these countries usually generate current account...

Earlier studies that investigated the J-Curve phenomenon employed aggregate trade data. Due to the aggregation bias problem, a few recent studies have shifted their emphasis toward using disaggregated data at bilateral level. However, studies related to the U.S., have investigated the phenomenon...

Did banking sector reforms in India and the adoption of capital adequacy norms based on the Basel Capital Accord prompt Indian banks to understate their bad loans? This paper addresses this question by investigating whether Indian banks under provide for loan loss provisions and understate their...

We identify the major public debt overhang episodes in the advanced economies since the early 1800s, characterized by public debt to GDP levels exceeding 90% for at least five years. Consistent with Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) and other more recent research, we find that public debt overhang...

From its beginning, Asia has been an important region for the OECD in terms of its members and partners. While the region’s economic performance is still strong, structural reforms, underpinned by coherent macroeconomic polices, need to be put in place to maintain this positive momentum. This...

Since the Eurozone’s Effilochement has become a fact and European integration theories, as defined in existing theories, falls short of offering a hope for the salvation of EU’s monetary integrity, the logic of geo-economy is prevailing among the European states. In particular, it means that...

Using unique data on mutual fund portfolios with different investment scopes, we study the extent of international diversification. Mutual funds invest in a surprisingly limited number of stocks—about 100. The number of holdings from a given region declines as the investment scope broadens....

The volume aims at providing an outlet for some of the best papers presented at the 15th Annual Conference of the African Econometric Society, which is one of the “chapters” of the International Econometric Society. Many of these papers represent the state of the art in financial...