We examine changes in bank credit across a wide range of emerging market economies during the last decade. The rich time-series and cross-section information allows us to draw broader lessons compared to many existing researches, which focus on a specific set of emerging market economies or on...

This paper analyses the recent boom-bust cycle in the housing markets of selected Former Soviet Union (FSU) countries. The analysis is based on a newly constructed database on house prices in the FSU countries. Our estimations suggest that house price developments can largely be explained by the...

Starting in the early 1990s, the Baltics, Russia, and other (BRO) countries of the former Soviet Union initiated tax reforms that varied widely at the later stages. Recently, some of the BRO countries, basing decisions on the proposition that lowering of the top marginal income tax rate would...

This paper examines how financial development affects the sources of growth-productivity and investment-using a sample of 145 countries for the period 1960-2011. We employ a range of econometric approaches, focusing on the CCA and MENA countries. The analysis looks beyond financial depth to...

House prices in Europe have shown diverging trends, and this paper seeks to explain these differences by analyzing three groups of countries: the "fast lane", the average performers, and the slow movers. Price movements in the first two groups are found to be driven mostly by income and trends...

Owing to concerns among low-income countries that the new debt sustainability framework of the Bretton Woods institutions may lock them into a so-called 'low debt-low growth' scenario, the United Nations has called for a more MDG-consistent debt-sustainability concept. This article shows that...