Globalization

When Russia launched mass privatization, it was widely believed that it would create a powerful constituency for the rule of law. That didn't happen. We present a dynamic equilibrium model of the political demand for the rule of law and show that beneficiaries of mass privatization may not demand the rule of law even if it is the Pareto efficient "rule of the game." The reason is that uncertainty about the legal regime can lead to asset stripping, and stripping can give agents an interest in prolonging the absence of the rule of law.

Throughout Latin America today, the question is being debated, has globalization failed, or has reform failed? The author argues that there is a clear connection between the low growth and high unemployment of the 1990s and the liberalization, privatization and stabilization policies pursued by the Washington consensus.

This paper examines characterizations of the dynamics for the first and second moments of the one-month interest rate, the 12-month excess bond return and exchange rates. The countries considered are the US, Germany, Japan, and the UK. Our tests are based on the implications of multi-country versions of the Cox et al. (1985) class of term structure models. Multi-country models are in several cases better able to explain the dynamics of the one-month interest rates and the 12-month excess bond returns than one-country models.

This paper argues that the use of monetary policy in response to the Asian financial crisis worsened the economic downturn and contributed to global economic instability, that we have spent too little time thinking about the behavior of the international economic and financial institutions given the important role that they play in the global economy and that reforms are needed to return the IMF to its original mandate of focusing on global financial stability.

We analyze a unique data set on multiunit auctions, which contains the actual demand schedules of the bidders as well as the auction awards in over 400 Swedish Treasury auctions. First, we document that bidders vary their prices, bid dispersion, and the quantity demanded in response to increased uncertainty at the time of bidding. Second, we find that bid shading can be explained by a winner's curse driven model in which each bidder submits only one bid, despite the fact that the bidders in our data set use much richer bidding strategies.

This paper examines the consequences of capital market liberalization, with special reference to its effects under different exchange rate regimes. Capital market liberalization has not lead to faster growth in developing countries, but has led to greater risks. It describes how International Monetary Fund policies have exacerbated the risks, as a result of the macro-economic response to crises, with bail-out packages that have intensified moral hazard problems. The paper provides a critique of the arguments for capital market liberalization.

This article aims to explain how standard economic theory—reflected in much of the popular policy folklore— has served to undermine the above propositions or runs counter to them. The first section shows how policies based on a neoclassical view of the labour market ultimately weaken workers' bargaining position because of pervasive market failures. The next two sections critically discuss the welfare and employment implications of a wider set of policies?