It is generally accepted that the introduction of financial derivatives that facilitate hedging is an important step in the development of stock markets. However, financial derivatives can potentially increase volatility in the underlying cash market, which might be detrimental to the...

The impact of expiration of derivatives contracts on the underlying cash market – on trading volumes, returns and volatility of returns – has been studied in various contexts. We use an AR-GARCH model to analyse the impact of expiration of derivatives contracts on the cash market at the...

We use enterprise data to analyse and contrast the determinants of enterprise performance in China and Russia. We find that in China, enterprise growth and efficiency is associated with rapid increases in factor inputs, but not correlated with ownership or institutional factors. However, in...

Productivity growth has long been associated with, among others, contestability of markets which, in turn, is dependent on the ease with which potential competitors to the incumbent firms can enter the product market. There is a growing consensus that in emerging markets regulatory and...

Economic agents routinely face various types of economic uncertainty. Seldom have these various forms of uncertainty manifested themselves more sharply than in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the transition was especially rapid and sharp since East...

Kosovo is a war-torn corner of the former Yugoslavia, where a civil war between ethnic Albanians and ethnic Serbs raged during most of the 1990s. We examine the incidence and depth of poverty and some of its correlates in post-conflict Kosovo using the Living Standards Measurement Survey....

Despite a significant expansion of the literature on conflicts and fragility of states, only a few systematic attempts have been made to link the theoretical literature on social conflicts to the available micro-level information about the people who are involved in these conflicts. We address...

Using a new pan-Indian data set, we examine the factors that potentially influence joint access to formal and informal credit markets. Our results are consistent with the literature and bring some new factors influencing access to credit to the fore.

We use Indian National Sample Survey employment-unemployment data for the urban sector for the years 1987 and 1999. Our results indicate that the gender wage gap had narrowed considerably between these two years, for all earnings deciles and for all education cohorts. The narrowing of the...

The authors use data from several sources, including plant-level data from the manufacturing sector in Germany, to expand the literature on outsourcing. They find that, in Germany, the extent of outsourcing among manufacturing industries is higher than among service industries and that the...