Traditional models of the choice of exchange rate regimes ignore the destabilizing effects of sharp and unanticipated exchange rate movements. Recent research, however, has shown that these movements have real costs in emerging markets owing to the dollarization of liabilities. This paper...

This paper extends the analysis of managerial share price concerns by allowing informed trading in the stock market. It is shown that because they decrease the manager's information advantage vis-à-vis the stock market, individual investors who trade on private information improve the...

This paper examines the effect of regulatory regime changes on the attributes of acquired thrifts for periods of stringency in 1990 to 1993, and deregulation in 1994 to 2000, with the removal of significant impediments for bank takeovers of thrifts. We test a regime change hypothesis that...

Relatively more efficient firms tend to maintain more stable levels of output and operating performance compared to their industry peers (Mills and Schumann 1985). Such firms also tend to have more sustainable performance (Berger et al. 1993). Given their more stable and sustainable levels of...

This paper proposes to organize thinking about the opportunities for improving and extending financial markets and safety nets for the poor, by focusing on factors that may explain why the linkage of local financial networks and safety nets with the larger economy often fails or is incomplete....

Innovations in lending technologies and market saturation have transformed La Paz, Bolivia into one of the most rapidly changing and competitive microfinance markets in the world. Two lenders stand out in this context: the pioneer BancoSol, which first entered and profitably expanded the loan...

This paper is concerned with the application of extreme value theory (EVT) to daily stock market closing prices on the Jamaican Stock Exchange to determine whether or not stock market returns follow a heavy-tail stable distribution. Our empirical result does not reject a heavy tail stable...

We use an econometric model of fertility and children's activities to examine the causal effects of fertility on a child's activities taking the endogeneity of fertility into account. Our specification uses latent factors to allow for unobserved influences on fertility to affect a child's...

Individual health care expenditures have complex non-normal distributions with severe positive skewness and leptokurtosis. These features present severe challenges to reliable modeling of expenditures for prediction purposes. We compare a variety of methods using quasi-experimental techniques....

This paper investigates the feasibility of a monetary union in Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) by looking at evidence of nominal exchange rate and inflation convergence. Using a methodology based on estimating time varying parameters, the evidence suggests non-convergence. The...