Modern banking institutions were virtually non-existent in the planned economies of central Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the early transition period, banking sectors began to develop during several years of macroeconomic decline and turbulence accompanied by repeated bank crises....

This essay asks whether business firms should be treated as moral or legal persons, capable of bearing rights and duties as distinct entities. Building on earlier work describing firms as relational contracts in performance (Adelstein 2010), it considers the nature of legal and moral...

This paper examines the compositional changes that occur in economies experiencing current account reversals using sectoral-level data on output and employment growth around 55 reversal episodes. The experiences of developing and industrialized countries are compared, and the role of currency...

The recent global financial crisis has generated considerable interest in reviewing the regulatory environment surrounding the banking sectors in most countries and proposals for changes designed to avoid such a severe outcome in the future. In this paper, we consider a particular aspect...

Formal microfinance institutions have been an important tool in the fight against poverty in developing countries, but their reach is necessarily limited. Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) are an alternative, informal mechanism for saving and borrowing that do not require external...

This paper incorporates a search-and-matching model of the labor market into a “New Open Economy Macroeconomics” framework. This allows for an examination of the behavior of tradable and nontradable sector unemployment rates under alternative monetary rules. An examination of dynamics in...