Many emerging markets have undertaken significant financial sector reforms especially in their banking sectors that have been quite critical for both financial development and real economic activity. In this paper, we investigate the success of banking reforms in India where significant banking...

The purpose of this study is demonstrating why entrepreneurs should monitor the broad dollar index. This paper explains the reason why the broad dollar index has become a risk (leverage) gauge since 2008 using the Covered Interest Parity (CIP). CIP can be viewed as a reflection of the shadow...

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role in credit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causal impact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causal determinant for...

Using comparable survey data from twelve European countries we investigate households' attitudes towards mortgage indebtedness. We find that a given debt burden creates much higher distress in Southern countries, France and Belgium, where fewer households have a mortgage outstanding relative to...

We develop a two-sector, heterogeneous-agent model with incomplete financial markets to study the distributional effects and aggregate welfare implications of alternative monetary policy rules in emerging market economies. Relative to inflation targeting, exchange rate management benefits...

This paper reviews the main features of the banking and financial sector in ten new EU members, and then examines the relationship between financial development and economic growth in these countries by estimating a dynamic panel model over the period 1994-2007. The evidence suggests that the...

The paper examines the relationship between leverage and growth in a group of emerging central and eastern European countries, who are at different levels of financial market development. We hypothesize a non-linear relationship in that moderate leverage could boost growth while very high...

Economic development implies that the efficiency of firms in developing countries is approaching that of firms in advanced economies. We examine the extent of this convergence in the Czech Republic and Russia, economies that represent alternative models of implementing development policies,...

The paper argues that networked firms are likely to have an advantage in securing external finance in countries with weak legal and judicial institutions since it helps financial institutions to minimize the underlying agency costs of lending. An analysis of recent BEEPS data from fifteen...