We study the effects of capital account liberalization on firm capital allocation and aggregate productivity in ten Eastern European countries. Using a large firm-level dataset, we show that capital account liberalization decreases the dispersion of the return to capital across firms,...

Recent reforms across Eastern European countries gave more flexibility and information for parties to engage in secured debt transactions. The menu of assets legally accepted as collateral was enlarged to include movable assets (e.g., machinery and equipment). Generalized...

Over the past decades, many countries have implemented significant reforms to foster domestic capital market development. These reforms included stock market liberalization, privatization programs, and the establishment of regulatory and supervisory frameworks. Despite the intense reform...

Over the past decades, many countries have implemented significant reforms to foster capital market development. Latin American countries were at the forefront of this process. The authors analyze where Latin American capital markets stand after these reforms. They find that despite the intense...

August 2000 - Hikes in U.S. interest rates in 1999-2000 have started to spill over to other economies' interest rates, which in many countries have risen to reflect the higher U.S. rates. Are countries with flexible exchange rates better able to isolate their domestic interest rates from this...

July 2000 - This study of an important class of investors-U.S. mutual funds-finds that mutual funds do engage in momentum trading (buying winners and selling losers). They also engage in contagion trading strategies (selling assets from one country when asset prices fall in another). Kaminsky,...

April 2000 - Debt-equity ratios do not tend to increase after financial liberalization, but there is a shift from long-term to short-term debt. Globalization has uneven effects for firms with and without access to international capital markets. Countries with deeper domestic financial markets...

December 1999 - Markets have had limited success predicting crises and might do better by drawing on private information available to resident enterprise managers, who seem to know better than markets about future movements in exchange rates. Kaufmann, Mehrez, and Schmukler investigate whether...