It has been emphasized that international promotion activities such as state visits or the presence of embassies, consulates and export promotion agencies help foster trade when there are search costs and/or uncertainty. In this paper we try to disentangle the differential effect that foreign...

Using empirical analysis, complemented with case studies, this paper studies under which circumstances IMF programs manage to catalyze private capital flows into the countries concerned. While we found no catalysis in general, the situation differs very much depending on the type of capital flow...

In this paper we explore empirically a long-standing question in the literature on finance for growth, namely whether the financial structure - in terms of the size of the banking system relative to the capital markets - matters for economic growth. We build upon the existing literature by...