Why are some lobby groups less benign in their external effects than others? Nearly three decades ago, Mancur Olson (1982) proposed that less-encompassing lobby groups with their constituents collectively representing a narrow range of sectors are more apt to seek the types of subsidies,...

We explore how the introduction of explicit deposit insurance affects deposit flows into and out of banks of varying risk levels. Using evidence from a natural experiment in Russia, we employ a difference-in-difference estimator to isolate the change in the deposit flows of a newly insured group...

Conventional wisdom in banking argues that diversification tends to reduce bank risk and improve performance, but the recent financial crisis suggests that aggressive diversification strategies may have resulted in increased risk taking and poor performance. This paper addresses this important...

The paper models monetary policy in China using a hybrid McCallum-Taylor empirical reaction function. The feedback rule allows for reactions to inflation and output gaps, and to developments in a trade-weighted exchange rate gap measure. The investigation finds that monetary policy in China has,...

Seaports have historically played a key role in facilitating trade and growth. This paper is the first attempt in the literature to analyse the formation of Chinese seaport cities and the dynamics that drives it. First, we aim to identify theoretically the emergence of urbanized seaports with...

This study examines the expanding role of fiscal policy at a time of financial crisis. It analyses the stimulative fiscal measures of the Russian government in 2008-2010 and compares these with simi-lar actions taken in other countries. The risks and limitations associated with the development...

We examine wealth effects for Russian money demand in a cointegrated vector autoregressive framework. We find that an aggregate wealth variable, as well as the components housing and equity prices included separately, significantly enter the long-run money demand relationship. There are feedback...

Underdeveloped financial markets and periods of high inflation have stimulated dollarization and currency substitution in the economies of Central Asia. Some authors argue that the latter can pose serious obstacles for the effective conduct of monetary policy and can affect households...

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the annual growth rates of the real Gross Regional Product (GRP) for each of the 31 Chinese provinces simultaneously. Beside the usual panel data models, we use panel models that explicitly account for spatial dependence between the GRP growth...

This paper develops an open-economy DSGE model with a housing-market sector and a borrowing constraint. Contrary to standard conventions, domestic households are allowed to invest in foreign housing and vice versa. Using Bayesian methods, the model is applied to data for Hong Kong. The results...