This paper examines the effects of IMF financial assistance on economic governance in developing countries, based on panel data analyses of perceived governance indicators. It uses a two-stage approach to address possible endogeneity issues. The results show that successful implementation of IMF...

This paper presents two approaches to modeling the use of IMF resources in order to gauge whether the recent decline in credit outstanding is a temporary or a permanent phenomenon. The two approaches-the time series behavior of credit outstanding and a two-stage program selection and access...

The recent development literature stresses that countries that receive large revenues from natural resource endowments typically raise less revenue from domestic taxation, and that this creates governance problems because the lower domestic tax effort reduces the incentive for the public...

Analyzing and projecting the behavior of macroeconomic variables in new EU member states presents special challenges, owing to limited time series of the available data. This paper presents an analysis of investment in Poland based on an underexplored sectoral data set. The determinants of...

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the cross-country relationship between a direct measure of competitive conduct of financial institutions and banking system fragility. Using the Panzar and Rosse H-Statistic as a measure for competition in 38 countries during 1980-2003, we...

The paper provides an empirical investigation of labor market pooling. The analysis concentrates on Italian industrial districts and shows that there is scattered evidence of a widespread wage premium. In particular, there is no evidence of district differentials for the returns to seniority...

This paper assesses the roles of shocks, rules, and institutions as possible sources of procyclicality in fiscal policy. By employing parametric and nonparametric techniques, I reach the following four main conclusions. First, policymakers' reactions to the business cycle is different depending...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the relationship between unexpected changes in macroeconomic variables and Australian stock returns over the period 1980-1991. The results suggest that stock returns are positively correlated with any surprise news in the current account deficit, the...

This paper reexamines the empirical relationship between financial development and economic growth. It presents evidence based on cross-section and panel data using an updated dataset, a variety of econometric methods, and two standard measures of financial development: the level of liquid...

Using the FEER approach we investigate the long-run equilibrium paths of the real effective exchange rates (REERs) of countries in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). In an attempt to address econometric estimation uncertainty, we employ both single-country (Johansen and ARDL)...