Two recent phenomena have transformed the nature of world trade: the explosive growth of Chinese trade, and the growth of vertically specialized trade due to international production fragmentation. While vertical specialization may explain much of the growth and unique features of Chinese trade,...

This paper explores the optimal law enforcement strategy of a Leviathan government in the presence of organized crime. The government is considered too weak to prevent an upsurge in crime, so it allows the mafia to generate a positive payoff by extracting rents in the shadow economy. From a...

We suggest an additional transmission channel of contagion on the interbank market - the liquidity channel. Examining the Russian banking sector, we and that the liquidity channel contributes significantly to understanding and predicting interbank market crises. Interbank market stability...

This paper evaluates the usefulness of a McCallum monetary policy rule based on money supply for maintaining price stability in mainland China. We examine whether excess money relative to rulebased values provides information that improves the forecasting of price developments. The results...

In January 2008, China adopted a new labour contract law. This new law represents the most significant reform to the legislation on employment relations in mainland China in more than a decade. The paper provides a theoretical framework on the inter-linkages between labour market regulation,...

The paper presents an econometric study of the two bank ratings assigned by Moody's Investors Service. According to Moody’s methodology, foreign-currency long-term deposit ratings are assigned on the basis of Bank Financial Strength Ratings (BFSR), taking into account “external bank support...

This paper forecasts inflation in China over a 12-month horizon. The analysis runs 15 alternative models and finds that only those considering many predictors via a principal component display a better relative forecasting performance than the univariate benchmark.

This study analyses the level and geographic dimension of China's market integration. The objective is to provide a broad characterization of China's market integration by performing a variety of empirical tests and providing comparisons to other studies on the same topic. The models tested are...

This paper evaluates the usefulness of a McCallum monetary policy rule based on money supply for maintaining price stability in mainland China. We examine whether excess money relative to rulebased values provides information that improves the forecasting of price developments. The results...

In this paper we assess the impact of oil price shocks on oil-producer and oil-consumer economies. VAR models for different countries are linked together via a trade matrix, as in Abeysinghe (2001). As expected, we find that oil producers (Russia and Canada here) benefit from oil price shocks....