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...

This paper analyzes the impact of news, oil prices, and international financial market developments on daily returns on Russian bond and stock markets. First, regarding returns, energy news affects returns, while news from the war in Chechnya is not significant. Market volatility does not appear...

Some observers have argued that the IMF's focus on the institutional weaknesses of the Asian crisis countries that are inherently difficult to remedy and not necessarily relevant for the crisis, and that their inclusion in IMF programs exacerbated the crisis. This paper argues that besides IMF...

This paper critically evaluates the existing empirical literature on creditor moral hazard in sovereign bond markets, proposes a unified theoretical approach to test for IMF-induced creditor moral hazard, and provides empirical evidence, using daily sovereign bond market spreads of Indonesia and...

This paper analyzes the impact of news, oil prices, and international financial market developments on daily returns on Russian bond and stock markets. First, there is some persistence in both bond and stock market returns. Second, we find that U.S. stock market returns Granger-cause Russian...

The successful accession to membership in the European Union (EU) by the current transition-economy applicants, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Poland, will depend to a large extent on their ability to align themselves with the institutions and the macroeconomic...

This paper examines Brada's (1998) conjecture about the path of real exchange rates in two successful transition economies, Hungary and Poland. He argues that, as a result of the very diverse fiscal and monetary policies to be found among these economies, real exchange rates in some economies...

In our analysis, we examine the convergence of all recent ten European Union (EU) members to EU standards. Novel features of the paper include more complete measures of convergence, in particular fiscal convergence; a broader examination of inflation convergence with respect to the Maastricht...