This paper estimates the causal effect of fiscal rules on fiscal balances in a panel of 142 countries over the period 1985-2015. Our instrumental variable strategy exploits the geographical diffusion of fiscal rules across countries. The intuition is that reforms in neighboring countries may...

How to prevent runs on open-end mutual funds? In recent years, markets have observed an innovation that changed the way open-end funds are priced. Alternative pricing rules (known as swing pricing) adjust funds' net asset values to pass on funds' trading costs to transacting shareholders. Using...

This paper analyzes the behavior of closed-end country fund discounts, including evidence from the Mexican and East Asian crises. We find that the ratio of fund prices to their fundamental value increases dramatically during a crisis, an anomaly that we denote the “closed-end country fund...

Benchmark following and portfolio rebalancing effects have often been cited when trying to explain international financial contagion phenomena. Using a dataset containing the country allocation of individual dedicated emerging market equity funds, we assess the relevance of mean-variance...

While SWF investment objectives to some extent reflect inherent characteristics, notable differences in strategic asset allocation (SAA) exist even amongst SWFs of similar types. Even so, this paper shows that the global crisis may have changed SWF’s asset allocations in ways that may not be...

We study the effect of foreign exchange intervention on the exchange rate relying on an instrumental-variables panel approach. We find robust evidence that intervention affects the level of the exchange rate in an economically meaningful way. A purchase of foreign currency of 1 percentage point...

We shed new light on the determinants of growth by tackling the blunt and weak instrument problems in the empirical growth literature. As an instrument for each endogenous variable, we propose average values of the same variable in neighboring countries. This method has the advantage of...

In this paper we first compare house price cycles in advanced and emerging economies using a new quarterly house price data set covering the period 1990-2012. We find that house prices in emerging economies grow faster, are more volatile, less persistent and less synchronized across countries...

The expansion of the global mutual funds industry has been characterized by growth in mature as well as emerging markets. This has clearly contributed to the development of local securities markets in emerging market economies, which in turn, has been key in attracting investment inflows from...