Canadian foreign direct investment and sales of Canadian multinational firms’ operations abroad, particularly in the manufacturing industry and in the United States, have accelerated sharply over the past decade. At the same time, although foreign demand has accelerated following the Great...

The Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing (QE) program has been accompanied by a flow of funds into emerging-market economies (EMEs) in search of higher returns. When Federal Reserve officials first mentioned an eventual slowdown and end of purchases under the central bank’s QE program in...

In continental Europe, labour shares in national income have exhibited considerable variation since 1970. Empirical and theoretical research suggests that the evolution of labour markets and labour market imperfections can, in part, explain this phenomenon. The author analyzes the role of...

In emerging-market economies, real exchange rate adjustment is critical for maintaining a sustainable current account position and thereby for helping to reduce macroeconomic and financial instability. The authors examine empirically two related hypotheses: (i) that real exchange rate...

Microfinance institutions now serve over 10 million poor households in the developing and developed world, and much of their success has been attributed to their innovative use of peer group lending. There is very little empirical evidence, however, to suggest that group lending schemes offer a...

Recent events, such as the East Asian, Mexican, Scandinavian, and Argentinian crises, have sparked considerable interest in exploring how shocks experienced by one country can spread vis-à-vis real and nominal links to other countries' banking systems. Given the large costs associated with...

The international business literature measures the link between the degree of internationalization (DOI) of a firm's activities and its performance. The results of this literature are mixed. The authors extend the analysis to Canadian bank-level data, but they also take into account the...

The authors examine the characteristics of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending from the 1960s to 2005. They find that there has been an increase in portfolio concentration, that lending terms have effectively lengthened, and that the proportion of total lending that occurs due to...

The Latin American debt crises in the 1980s and the Asian crisis in the late 1990s both provided impetus for reforming the framework for restructuring sovereign debt. In the late 1980s, the Brady plan established the importance of substantive debt relief in addressing some crises. A decade...

The authors examine the investment behaviour of a sample of small, credit-constrained firms in Sri Lanka. Using a unique panel-data set, they analyze and compare the activities of two groups of small firms distinguished by their different access to financing; one group consists of firms with...