Chile’s average economic growth between 1990 and 1998 was above 7 percent per year, more than double than in previous decades, and higher than in any other Latin American country in the same period. This paper assesses empirically the main hypotheses suggested in the literature about the...

This paper revisits the relative importance of global versus country-specific factors underlying stock returns. It constructs a new firm level data set covering emerging and developed markets and estimates a simple factor model, which breaks down stock returns into a global business cycle...

The paper investigates the growth effects of public capital in Portugal using annual data for the period 1965-95. Both a production function and a vector autoregressive model are estimated. Public capital is shown to be a significant long-term determinant of output growth. The size of the...

This paper examines the persistence of shocks to the terms of trade, using annual data on 42 Sub-Saharan African countries between 1960-96. We find that the persistence of terms of trade shocks varies widely—for about half the countries such shocks are short-lived, while for one-third of the...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between privatization and measures of fiscal and macroeconomic performance. One of the main findings is that privatization proceeds transferred to the budget tend to be saved. Specifically, they are largely used to reduce domestic financing,...

The Iranian real gross domestic product in the period of 1959-2001 reveals a relatively high degree of instability. Some of this instability almost certainly arises because of external shocks to the economy. This paper focuses on three shocks, or interventions, which seem to have had...

In this paper an event study is conducted to detect price reactions on dividend announcements using data from the Austrian stock market. We use the Market Model and the Market Model with Dummies to describe the return generating process. To identify the significance of abnormal returns we apply...

This paper investigates the determinants of the international role of a currency. It argues that standard determinants such as monetary performance and financial openness are at best imperfect indicators of a currency’s stability prospects, because the issuer’s promise of stability is not...

This paper investigates seasonal anomalies in stock returns on Bucharest Stock Exchange. The anomalies studied are two of the most common security price anomalies detected on international stock markets, the day-of-the-week effect and the month-of-the-year effect. The empirical research is...

This paper explores the determinants of expected rates of realignment of the French franc/Deutsche mark exchange rate during the period 1987-1991. It does so by first estimating expected parity changes and then relating these to economic variables that are believed to influence agents’...