December 2015 saw crude oil prices plunge, hitting 2008 lows. This pushed down the MICEX Index (5.7%) and all sector indices (except transport and chemical industries) and Russian blue-chip stocks (except VTB). MICEX average daily turnover and capitalization was down 7.8% and 7.7%, respectively,...

Spain´s sovereign crisis has many sides and causes. An unviable economic model and an insolvent financial sector generated a private sector crisis that rapidly spread to the Government´s balance sheet. The public sector itself had –and continues to have- its own serious dysfunctions. One of...

What role does political influence play in access to finance? Using a comprehensive cross-country dataset, I characterize how and why domestic political connections affect firms' ability to access all types of finance — exploiting firms' cross-listing activity as a source of empirical...

Although there is a lack of consensus regarding derivatives and the development of sharia-compliant funds to mimic hedge funds in order to tap the global surplus liquidity especially the Gulf petrodollar, sharia scholars are generally agreeable that hedging is permissible and necessary as a risk...

Discovery for Eastern European enterprises based on their cross-listing on Western European exchanges. Despite the fact that the crosslisting behavior of companies has been analyzed very actively since the mid-70s, many competing hypotheses exist, and the debate is far from reaching an end....

This paper develops a series of stock market representativeness indices as a new method for analysing stock market development, and applies this method to data on stock markets and economies of thirty-one European countries, as well as Japan and the USA. The main conclusion is that stock markets...

We analyze foreigners' and domestic institutional investors' positions in U.S. equities. Controlling for many factors, we uncover a common preference for large firms and firms that are diversified internationally. The domestic preference for internationally diversified firms implies that...

We examine the effect of securities laws on stock market development in 49 countries. We find almost no evidence that public enforcement benefits stock markets, and strong evidence that laws facilitating private enforcement through disclosure and liability rules benefit stock markets

This introductory note summarizes and draws together the work reported in eight research papers written by staff economists of the Board's Division of International Finance as part of a project on global financial integration. The eight papers are also International Discussion Finance Discussion...

In 2003 China posted its highest economic growth rate in seven years, a robust 9.1 percent. Today the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) dwarfs by more than eight fold its level of 1978, the year China began taking its first tentative steps away from a centrally-planned communist economy...