The establishment of the EU-15 `single market' in 1993 brought about a high degree of similarity in firms' growth opportunities across countries, while substantial diversity existed in the development of national financial markets. We compare within-industry growth rates of similar...

We test whether more developed financial systems are better at tackling asymmetric information proxied by firm age and size. Comparing the growth effect of financial development (FD) across firms of different type, we find that FD disproportionately fosters the growth of young companies, while...

The aim of this paper is to construct theoretical models which help to shed light on the recent criticisms of volatile investment flows. We do not make any empirical attempt to establish the existence or gauge the importance of the adverse effects of volatile investment flows nor do we make any...

Using panel data of 19 developed economies in the period 1985-2000, we show that share issue privatization (SIP) strongly affects a fundamental aspect of financial development: market liquidity. First, we identify the channels through which a sustained SIP program boosts the liquidity of the...

This Paper studies the relationship between civil war and private investment in a poor, resource abundant country using microeconomic data for Angola. We focus on diamond mining firms and conduct an event study on the sudden end of the conflict, marked by the death of the rebel movement leader...

In most industrialized economies, financial wealth is distributed far more unequally than income. According to Wolff (2007) more than half of the American households possess almost no productive capital while realizing about 20 percent of national income. This mismatch poses a problem for the...

A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private...

This paper introduces a model, based on the Kalman filter framework, which allows for time varying parameters, latent factors, and a general GARCH structure for the residuals. With this extension of the Bekaert and Harvey (1997) model it is possible to test if an emerging stock market becomes...

This paper investigates whether different systems of financial market organization influence the way in which newly created stock markets become more (weak-form) efficient. The author conducts a detailed comparative analysis of stocks listed on the Budapest and Warsaw Stock Exchanges, 1991-98,...

We study the effects of sterilized intervention operations executed on behalf of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) using tick-by-tick transaction data between 1985-95.We extend preliminary analysis conducted by Fischer and Zurlinden (1999) by matching these data with intra-day indicative exchange...