Using a two-period model of a commodity market with a large number of atomistic consumers and two strategic sellers, we show that a speculator with access to storage can lower the market price while buying and raise the price while selling by clever use of limit, stop-loss, and market orders....

This paper characterizes the optimal transaction tax in an equilibrium model of competitive financial markets. As long as investors hold heterogeneous beliefs that are not related to their fundamental trading motives and the planner calculates welfare using any single belief, a strictly positive...

We study the effect of trading costs on information aggregation and acquisition in financial markets. For a given precision of investors' private information, an irrelevance result emerges when investors are ex-ante identical: price informativeness is independent of the level of trading costs....

Required reserves on banks' deposit liabilities have been utilized by both industrial and developing countries to discourage and sterilize international capital flows. In this paper we utilize an open economy macro model incorporating bank credit to evaluate this policy. The model suggests that...

The paper analyzes three issues in international taxation: (a) How the opening of the economy to international capital movements affects the size and structure of the fiscal branch of government: (b) Optimal restrictions on capital exports in the face of capital flight; and (c) The structure of...

For three years after the typical emerging economy opens its stock market to inflows of foreign capital, the average annual growth rate of the real wage in the manufacturing sector increases by a factor of three. No such increase occurs in a control group of countries. The temporary increase in...

According to the conventional bank lending channel of monetary policy, wholesale funding in economies with well-developed financial markets moves negatively with retail deposits in response to changes in the monetary policy rate, thereby weakening the transmission of monetary policy. We present...

The financial crisis has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth, especially for developing countries. The empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration....

Property tax revenues - the largest discretionary source of revenue for local governments - adjust at a pace that is inconsistent with property values in the US. We show that this form of revenue smoothing may be rooted in the political economy of municipalities. Measures of local budget...