This paper attempts to establish the trend of market development in Europe in thecenturies before the industrial revolution, by applying three different measures ofmarket integration to a compilation of monthly and annual price data. In contrast tomuch of the existing work, which suggests that...

The existence of a self-regulating arbitrage mechanism under the gold standard has been tradi-tionally considered as one of its main advantages, and attracted a corresponding research interest.This research is arguably relevant not only to test for the effciency of the gold points, but also...

Characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics. However,their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions. Inthis paper we develop a revealed preference approach to characteristics models. We derivethe necessary and sufficient...

Using a unique bank-level dataset on the Ugandan banking system over theperiod 1999 to 2005, we explore the factors behind consistently high interest rate spreadsand margins. While foreign banks charge lower interest rate spreads, we do not find arobust and economically significant relationship...

We investigate determinants of launch spreads in European securitizationtransactions over the last decade. First, we develop a simple, reduced-form pricingmodel for all issues across different transaction types and test it. We document thecritical importance of credit ratings without refinements...

Securitisations usually involve creating multiple tranches of a single issue with different characteristics, placed on the market as separate securities. Various theoretical explanations have been advanced to explain such tranching. This paper provides the first systematic testing of such...

This paper extends and modifies the Keynesian critique of inflation targetingwith reference to stabilisation policy in emerging market economies. The IMF‘basic monetary programming framework’ for developing countries usesgovernment borrowing and the exchange rate as policy instruments in...