Using industry-level data, this paper shows that the European transition region benefited much more strongly from financial integration in terms of economic growth than other developing countries in the years preceding the current crisis. We analyze several factors that may explain this finding:...

The paper analyses the drivers of sovereign risk for 31 advanced and emerging economies during the European sovereign debt crisis. It shows that a deterioration in countries’ fundamentals and fundamentals contagion – a sharp rise in the sensitivity of financial markets to fundamentals –...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the stocks of human capital were one of the few positive legacies from communism. However, if factories under communism were so inefficient, why would the education system not have been? Using the education production function approach and new data on...